Deep South (5 page)

"You do that? You lead them with dead chickens?" Thigpen nodded. "Now, that I'd like to see," Anna said honestly.

Adding a few banalities lest he realize she'd been leading him down the garden path, she took her leave. Time would tell whether or not Randy Thigpen was going to be a supervisor's nightmare. He clearly wasn't a dream come true.

The Port Gibson Ranger Station was a low white building set off the west side of the Trace. Asphalt and chain-link fence struggled against some truly fine old pin oaks and nearly succeeded in giving it a soulless governmental look.

The structure was H-shaped, with the hollow parts of the H as open porticos. To the left were garage doors, both open, where maintenance worked on the many machines needed to groom the ninety miles of roadway in the district. To the right was a windowless block, the purpose of which Anna couldn't guess. A patrol car was parked in front of the east-facing portico. By process of elimination, she deduced this heralded the presence of Bartholomew Dinkin. Dinkin was a complete blank, and Anna harbored a hope he would inspire more confidence than his compatriot.

Walking quietly from habit, she crossed the concrete and let herself into the ranger station. As she slipped through the door, a blast of cold stale air hit her. Though the day was fine, mid-seventies with a breeze, the air-conditioning was cranked up-or down-till the office hovered at sixty-eight. Cranked was an apt description. The building had not been designed for central air, and two aging window units, poked unattractively through either end of the tunnel-like office, clattered and clunked through their duties.

The staleness comprised two competing elements: grease and supercooled cigarette smoke. To Anna's left was a small, untidy office, full of morning sunlight forced through dirty windows. In front of her, in the long dark core of this ungraceful suite, were two old wooden desks butted up against one another so they formed a single surface, chairs on opposite sides, a makeshift partners' desk.

At the nearer one sat the green and gray lump that had to be Field Ranger Bartholomew Dinkin. He wasn't as fat as Thigpen, but he was in the running. By the looks of what remained of his breakfast-three sausage biscuit wrappers and two of the cardboard packets used to serve up hash browns-he was competing for the heavyweight title. Dinkin carried the bulk of his weight "behind the counter," as a shopkeeper in New York had described the phenomenon to Anna. A lot of green polyester-wool blend had been procured to cover the poster At his elbow was an ashtray half full of cold butts. A teensy-weensy ache began behind Anna's left ear.

Bull by the horns, she thought, and closing the door, moved into her new territory. "Hey," she warned him of the invasion. "You must be Bartholomew Dinkin. I just met up with Randy up the road a piece." Dinkin stood, carefully wiping his mouth, then his fingers, free of sausage grease. That done, he stuck out a meaty paw for Anna to shake.

"I take it you're the new district ranger," he said amiably enough.

Dense black hair was sprinkled with wiry white. He wore it close to his skull, the part marked in by the barber's clippers. His face was lined more by the extra flesh than age. Beyond those drawbacks, Dinkin was an attractive man. His skin deep brown, the tone even and rich, his cars small and close to his head, his teeth crooked but not stained. His most striking feature was his eyes: whites clear and cool, the irises a startling gray-green. Against his dark skin they appeared luminescent, as though he saw things denied ordinary mortals.

Dinkin offered Anna coffee from a pot on top of a file cabinet behind the door. She accepted and wandered while he waited on her.

The office was dirty. Not just old and cluttered, but dirty, as if maintenance had gone on strike. Or given up. The rangers' desks were elbow deep in flotsam: coffee cups, evidence, candy wrappers, phone messages. Two bulletin boards were completely covered with notes and notices, some yellowed and curling with age. Anna pinched up the corner of a notification of an electrical shutdown at the Mount Locust Historical Site. It was seven years old. "We were going to get around to organizing those boards," Bartholomew told her as he set her coffee down on Thigpen's desk. "But we heard you were...  well we thought that might be a good job for you." Anna picked up her coffee. "Why's that?" Dinkin sat, he squirmed a little. "You know. You being a woman and all."

"Ah," Anna said. She drank her coffee and watched Dinkin.

He began to look uncomfortable. He moistened a fingertip, blotted up biscuit crumbs and carried them to his mouth. "What's with the cigarette butts?" she asked, to keep him off balance.

"Randy likes his weed. Way out here where nobody much comes, we sort of make our own rules," he said referring to smoking in a federal building.

It had been a no-no for so long that the policy was no longer even controversial. At least not in most states of the union. "That happens," Anna said. "But I expect we'd better move the smoking outside." Her first executive decision. She waited to see if it was going to cost her.

Barth sat a moment, his face unreadable.

"You want to see your office?" he asked abruptly. "Sure." Anna put down the coffee, having no idea whether she'd won or lost points in what was clearly going to be a tiresome course in power politics. As she followed him into the second office on the left, she tried without success to remember why she'd wanted to move up into management. She hated leading.

She was damned if she was going to follow. As a field ranger in the West that individualism bad stood her in good stead.

Now she was going to have to develop people skills. Anna found herself wishing she was back on the road with the alligator.

Anna's office was small and dirtv. Scraps of wisdom, trash, information and memorabilia from the last half dozen district rangers were crammed in drawers and file cabinets, thumbtacked to walls, taped to cupboards.

A vintage computer, the likes of which any self-respecting grade school would turn its nose up at, sat dusty and forlorn in one corner. A deceased roach had turned up six feet worth of toes and lay in the dust beneath a counter built into the far wall and serving as a desk. An office chair, its once ergonomically correct back sprung out of alignment by weight or abuse, awaited her administrative behind. Still Anna was pleased. A real office, four walls and a door. She was moving on up in the world. The primitive, visceral, female need to clean, to impose order, rose within her.

She shook it off. Once established, she could do as she saw fit.

For the present, she sensed if either of these two guys saw her with a broom in her hand, it would put her ten steps back on a road that promised to be long and hard enough from the outset. "I thought I heard voices. Either you're the new district ranger or the Girl Scouts have started wearing guns." Anna left off her janitorial lusts and turned. In the door of her office stood a compact man in a class-A maintenance uniform. He was built of squares: law, shoulders, wide square hips, thick thighs.

There might have been a bit of fat on him but it was spread thin as butter.

Though not more than a few inches taller than Anna-maybe five-six or eight-she guessed he was terrifically strong. And black. Not the golden chocolaty shade of Barth, but deep, dark, old-rotary-phone black. He smiled, a square smile, showing large square teeth, and stuck out his hand. "I'm George Wentworth, head of maintenance for the Port Gibson District. That other office is mine." Anna liked him. There were no shadows about the man. Nothing felt hidden. She took his hand, and she liked him even more. It was warm and dry, dark on the backs of the fingers and a soft tan on the palm. The nails were clipped and clean, his grip neither too much nor too little for a big man shaking hands with a small woman.

"When did you get in?" Wentworth asked. Anna told him and he said,

"Let me call a couple of my boys to give you a hand moving in."

"We're going to get along fine," Anna said and was treated to another beautiful smile, a study of warmth in black and white.

Anna'd taken George to be in his early thirties, but a few miles on the road with him and she upped it to mid-to-late forties. That or he'd married when he was eleven years old. George was a family man, and it didn't take long before he'd told Anna about Leda, his wife, who "put up with him just like he deserved it," and his three boys. The youngest was a student at Alcorn State and, George told her with great pride, on the way to being the next Air McNair. From the delivery, Anna guessed this was a good thing but bad to admit she had no idea what he was talking about. Air McNair, be told her, was a football player from Alcorn who'd made the pros. Lockley-Lock-George's son, would put McNair to shame. A boy so fast, so handsome, so strong and smart and honest that girls whistled and coaches swooned wherever he went.

The maintenance chief didn't say it in those words, that would have been sacrilege, but Anna got the message.

With the help of Frank, George and a scrawny, wiry little white guy-one of Wentworth's mower drivers-Anna's belongings were in her house within an hour and she had an invitation to lunch.

W hen next you see me, I shall be applying for the position of cirus fat lady," Anna told her sister, Molly, on the phone that night.

"I must have gained ten pounds."

"One swallow does not make a spring."

"It might if the swallow is deep-fried," Anna countered, and they both laughed, enjoying the nonsense codes of a lifetime together. "We ate in Port Gibson. This lovely movie-set little Southern town with a church-one of a lot of churches-on Main Street. Instead of a cross on top of the steeple, it's got a big gold finger pointed to heaven."

"You're kidding."

"Nope. Lots of God, little in the way of groceries. The culinary glories of the South don't seem to be represented in my district. George gave me a choice of the Piggly Wiggly plate lunch, a Sonic Burger or Gary's Shell Station."

"You chose Gary's?"

"How could I not? In the back of the gas station, there's a lunch counter. Doing a fine business, I might add, selling deep-fried everything. Everything deep-fried, I should say. I had deep-fried potatoes, onions and pickles. Want to know the creepy part?"

"I thought that was the creepy part."

"It was really good." There was a faint groan from the New York end of the line and a lack of sound Anna was only just coming to get used to.

No abrupt shushing as her sister exhaled smoke. Nine months before, Molly had been hospitalized for several weeks. She had very nearly died, and finally she'd been convinced that maybe, just maybe, she should quit smoking. Despite its homicidal bent, Molly loved her dear old drug and missed it terribly. During the first two weeks of the new regimen, Anna had been glad to live halfway across the country. The only report she'd gotten of the rigors of withdrawal were from Molly's fiance. Being intensely loyal, as befitted his exalted position, all be would say was,

"Thank God she's still got some Demerol left from the hospital." Thinking of the fiance, a man who had once been Anna's lover, thus providing evidence that life, if it doesn't mimic art, at least mimics the soaps, Anna asked: "How's Frederick? Any date set?" There was a shivery intake of breath, and Anna had a sick feeling for a second that her sister had started smoking again, but it was just nervous exhilaration.

"A date is set," Molly said, giggled, then added, "I would say I hate feeling like a giddy teenager, being post-menopausal and all, but I don't. I'm getting a kick out of it. When it's not scaring me to death.

September twenty-third."

"Any special reason the twenty-third?" Anna asked, because she knew Molly, like any giddy teenager, would want to talk but, unlike most teenagers, had been trained to listen instead.

Molly laughed. "Calendars. His, mine, and ours. We're both booked like single professionals. It was the first day we felt safe to pencil in a lifetime commitment." Anna suffered a pang of envy. Or nostalgia. She wasn't sure. Her lifetime commitment had lasted seven years, then her husband was taken from her in a mindless, pointless accident. A while back she'd finally extinguished the torch she carried for Zach, but there'd been no new flame, at least not one that could hold a candle to the conflagration of the memory of that first and all-consuming love.

Anna shook off the loneliness, made sure none of it was left to taint her voice, and so her sister's boy, and asked: "Church?

Courthouse? On horseback in the surf? I've got to know what sort of dress to buy." 5S "You wear a bona fide dress, and we'll get married wherever you say.

Anna was stung. She wore dresses. She'd worn one less than a year before. "Just kidding," Molly said, and it annoyed Anna that her mind could be read so easily, even over the phone. "No place or plan yet.

Setting a date was trauma enough for us both." Molly's and Frederick's was to be a thoroughly modern marriage.

They lived in different cities-she in New York, he in Chicago. This was his third marriage, her first. There would be no children, and they would commute. The very things that might earmark a union for failure, but Anna knew this one would last.

Suddenly tired of romance and matrimony, she said: "Let me tell you about my alligator." i t bad been many years since Anna had been stationed at a campground. The upside was a mildly pleasant proprietary feeling, one's own little fiefdom. The down side was long and steep.