Bittersweet

by Susan Wittig Albert

  But the weather guy on KSAT-TV in San Antonio, some seventy crow miles away, was forecasting a high in the upper 50s and partly cloudy skies with scattered showers through the rest of the week—good hunting weather. Deer season was three weeks old, and with the Thanksgiving weekend coming up, she would be patrolling the hills and canyons of northern Uvalde County—her third of the county’s nearly 1,600 square miles. The other 1,000 square miles were split between wardens Bert Jenkins and Dusty Ross, her comrades-in-arms. Their District Two boss, headquartered in San Antonio, always talked about them as if they were a team, but their patrol areas were so large that there wasn’t much chance for teamwork. Most of the time they were on their own. If one of them radioed for backup, they were likely to get the nearest deputy sheriff.

  And vice versa. Just after midnight a couple of weeks ago, a Uvalde County deputy had been alerted to a copper theft in progress at a construction site on the Old Leakey Road, east of Garner State Park. He apprehended two of the thieves, but the third fled in an old black pickup. Happening to be on patrol in the area, Mack had picked up the dispatch on her radio, spotted the suspect with a roll of copper wire in the back of his vehicle, and stopped him. He gave her a little trouble, but her martial arts training came in handy, along with the fact that she was trim and fit from jogging and weight training and he was your basic six-pack-a-day couch potato, two-twenty-plus and slow on his feet. She had him on the ground with her knee in his back and was cuffing him as another deputy arrived on the scene. Last she’d heard, two of the thieves had bonded out, but her guy was still in the county jail charged with copper theft, criminal trespass, and resisting arrest.

  Mack didn’t much like that part of the job, but it came with the territory. In Texas, wardens and sheriffs’ deputies alike were peace officers, with similar duties, similar armament and vehicles, and similar training—except that the deputies didn’t have to know as much about the state and federal wildlife regs as the wardens did. In addition to the 600-plus hours Mack had put in to get her peace officer certification, her curriculum included another 750 hours of instruction at the Game Warden Training Academy. And all this on top of her undergraduate major in Criminal Justice and a Wildlife Biology minor from Sam Houston State. Texas Parks and Wildlife liked to brag that its game wardens were the best-trained conservation officers in the entire United States. From what Mack had observed of her fellow wardens in the five years since she’d graduated from the Academy, that was pretty much on the mark.

  Next door, the rooster who lorded it over her neighbor’s flock of hens noticed the first brush of pink in the sky and cheerfully unfurled his dawn song. From the grassy paddock behind the house (one of the reasons she liked this little place), Cheyenne, Mack’s paint quarter horse, nickered softly, and a couple of backyards down the block, a neighbor’s sorrel mare replied with a pleasant whinny. The two horses often seemed to communicate, Mack had noticed, like friends gossiping across the back fence about what was going on in the neighborhood. Did you see that Bartlett kid with his BB gun? Deliberately shot out the garage window and claimed it was an accident. And how about Sam Gruber—drunk again on Saturday night. If I were Mrs. Gruber, I’d leave him. Cheyenne needed exercise, but since hunting season began, there hadn’t been time to ride her—and there wouldn’t be time until the hoopla was over, at the end of January.

  Mack set her coffee mug into the truck’s cup holder. Then she paused beside the open passenger door to do a quick equipment check. The dash-mounted GPS, light-control switch box, and radio were in working order. The console held her log and map folder, spotting scope, binoculars, and flashlight, along with a digital camera, mini-cassette recorder, and first-aid and evidence kits. Her rain gear and highway flares were under the seat, along with a spare flashlight, extra batteries, and a basic truck tool kit. Her AR-15 was already locked into the cab ceiling rack. Like all wardens, she spent most of her waking hours in her truck. She tried to keep stuff stowed neatly and the trash shoveled out.

  She opened the door of the rear cab and dropped her insulated lunch pack and thermos of hot chocolate on the floor. Designed to transport prisoners, the truck’s rear cab was separated from the front by a sturdy cage-wire panel and a bullet-proof sliding glass pane, and the doors couldn’t be opened from the inside. She straightened up and checked her duty belt: her holstered .40 caliber 15-round Glock 22, handcuffs, pepper spray, Maglite, disposable gloves, and handy multi-tool—the Leatherman that had belonged to her father.

  Satisfied that she hadn’t forgotten anything, she slid onto the seat, flipped open her patrol log, and noted the date (11/22), time (0500), and weather (clear, 30F). She’d gotten into the habit of recording the weather after she discovered that it helped her to remember incidents more clearly when it came time to write up the full report on the computer back in her office, the second bedroom of her tiny, two-bedroom house.

  “Ready to hit the road, Molly?” She smiled at the dog perched on the passenger seat. In answer, Molly wagged her butt—like most ranch dogs, her tail had been docked so it wouldn’t get stepped on by a cow or a horse or caught in a gate. In this kind of weather, Molly got to do ride-alongs several times a week. Summer was a different story. It was against regulations to leave the truck and the AC running when she made a stop, and the temp in the cab could reach triple digits in a matter of minutes. In the summer, Molly had to stay home.

  Mack started the truck and backed out of the driveway. She drove up Oak Street, then turned onto Lee and then onto Main, automatically slowing as she drove past the general store. She noticed the three battered pickups lined up fender to fender in front and guessed that Cal, Jerky, and Butch—three old-timers who started every day but Sunday with a companionable cup of java—were already gathered around the coffeepot in the back of the store, where she could see a faint light.

  A couple of doors down, though, the Lost Maples Café was still dark, and there were no vehicles parked in front. In fact, the street was deserted, although in another hour, the café would be doing a land-office business—rightfully so, for the breakfast tacos were pretty good, especially the taco called “The Kitchen Sink.” The Sink had everything—generous helpings of eggs, potatoes, cheese, onions, ham, sausage, bacon, and jalapeños, wrapped neatly in a flour tortilla about as big as the hubcap on her truck and served with a salsa that was hot enough to melt the fillings in your teeth. But it was the pie that most folks came for—homemade cherry pie, buttermilk pie, banana cream pie, and more. The laminated legend on the napkin holder said “Pie fixes everything,” and Mack agreed.

  Mack also agreed with the village motto, “Utopia Is a Paradise: Let’s Keep It Nice.” It was only a couple of hundred souls. The county seat, Uvalde, was forty-five miles to the southwest, and the nearest city, Kerrville, was sixty miles to the northeast, both on hilly, winding two-lanes. But Mack had no complaints. She had never been a lover of crowded urban-suburban areas, especially after spending several years in Adams County, which was sliced by I-35 and studded with shopping malls and strip centers.

  Not coincidentally, the assignment to Uvalde County came the week after her divorce from Lanny and the sale of their condo some seven months before, so moving from Pecan Springs to Utopia had brought a new beginning in more ways than one. She was working in the prettiest county in the whole state (in her opinion), and living in a sweet little rental house, although she’d be the first to admit that she hadn’t had time to get proper furniture or even hang curtains at the windows. She’d gotten Cheyenne, her first horse since the gelding she’d shared with her father and two younger brothers. And she’d adopted Molly. (Lanny had been mauled by a neighbor’s bulldog as a kid and refused to have a dog in the house.)

  And she had met Derek Mitford, a good-looking man with a quirky eyebrow, dark hair that fell over his forehead, and a deep cleft in his chin. His wife, he said, had died of cancer several years ago. He and his daughters had come from a suburb of St. Louis, where h
e’d worked in an investment bank. They’d just moved into the new house he’d built on a small ranch outside of town.

  Mack and Derek had been introduced by Jack Krause at the café several weeks before. A broad-shouldered man with thick, curly brown hair, Jack was the assistant foreman at Three Gates Game Ranch. He had given Mack, the new game warden, the grand tour of Three Gates the month before, showing her the ranch’s deer-breeding facilities and the feeding stations and the air-conditioned blinds. The visit was a duty call and Mack was not impressed. She disliked the whole idea of breeding trophy white-tails and charging wealthy hunters thousands of dollars to sit in a blind and shoot them when they showed up at the feeder. She disliked Jack, too, although she couldn’t put her finger on why, except that he reminded her of a bully who had given her a hard time back in seventh grade.

  But she liked Derek. He might look like a dude rancher in his suede vest and Tony Lama Boots, but he seemed to have an enormous appreciation for the town and everybody in it. “Utopia,” he’d mused, after Jack had gone off and they found themselves sitting with coffee and pie (pecan fudge for him and chocolate meringue for her) at the booth in the corner of the café. “I picked this place because of the name. Utopia. Came down here, looked around, and loved it. Perfect name for a perfect little town. Nice to be in a place where everybody’s got roots, don’t you think? And where everybody knows all about everybody else and all their relatives.”

  “I like the idea of roots,” Mack agreed cautiously, although she was less sure about everybody knowing all about everybody else. She liked her privacy. And while she liked Utopia, she didn’t for a moment think it was perfect.

  “I couldn’t make it way out here in the boonies if it weren’t for the Internet, though,” Derek had added, picking up his Green Bay Packers coffee mug. Mack’s mug was red and said “Shh, there’s beer in here.” The mugs at the café, like the vintage fifties tables and chairs, were gleefully mismatched. “I’ve got my office set up so I can be in touch with the financial markets all day long, the way I was in St. Louis. And then I come into this place”—he gestured around the café—“and it’s like going back to the 1940s. Best of both worlds.” He pointed to the little sign on the table. “Maybe pie really does fix everything,” he said with a laugh.

  She noticed that his hands and nails were nicely cared for—city hands, she thought. Self-consciously, she hid hers, which were not city hands, by any stretch. And when he asked what she did for a living, she said casually, “I work with Texas Parks and Wildlife.” It was her day off, and she was wearing jeans and a yellow plaid shirt instead of her uniform, and her dark hair was loose around her shoulders, instead of skinned back into a ponytail as it was when she was working. Somebody had interrupted them, then, and he hadn’t asked for details.

  She thought she would probably see him again—Utopia wasn’t the kind of place where you could completely lose track of somebody. And sure enough, a few days later they’d bumped into each other at the post office. She’d been in uniform that time, which necessitated an explanation of what exactly she did for Texas Parks and Wildlife. Derek cast a startled glance at the Glock on her hip, and she’d figured that was the end of an interesting beginning.

  But to her surprise, he had phoned the next Sunday with a casual invitation to an impromptu afternoon hike along the river with him and his two daughters, aged thirteen and fifteen. It wasn’t exactly a comfortable outing, for she’d had a difficult time hiding her surprise at the upscale contemporary luxury of Derek’s architect-designed glass-and-stone ranch house, which reminded her uneasily of the world she and Lanny had lived in. The girls were . . . well, they were probably typical teenagers, she thought. They wore tight pants and shirts that showed a lot of skin and shape, and they were far more interested in their smartphones than in the lovely autumn woods along the river. What’s more, they made it clear that they didn’t like Mack’s intrusion into their weekend. She hadn’t expected Derek to call after that.

  He surprised her again. He’d asked her out for an elegant Saturday night dinner at the ranch. The girls were doing an overnight with friends, and he’d cooked a gourmet meal just for the two of them. She’d worn her one best dress, a short, slim, silky red number with a low V neckline that Lanny had picked out for her to wear to his firm’s Christmas party two years before. And she’d worn makeup, which she didn’t wear on the job.

  Derek had whistled when he helped her off with her coat. “Utopia is full of surprises,” he’d said, letting his gaze linger appreciatively on her neckline. He shook his head, faintly amused, and took her hand. “And that’s what you’re hiding under that game warden’s uniform? There oughta be a law, Mackenzie. You should wear a dress like that every day.” She didn’t tell him that she preferred her uniform, which kept her from having to make decisions about dresses and shoes and stuff like that. But she didn’t pull her hand back, either.

  “Pie fixes everything,” she thought now, as she cruised past the Lost Maples Café and on down the street. Maybe pie was what she needed to patch up that hole in her heart that had been left when her marriage broke up.

  Not that she blamed Lanny for what had happened. They had gotten engaged in college, married when she graduated from the Academy, and settled down to a new home and new careers—Lanny as a civil engineer working for a large architectural firm in Austin, Mack as a first-year game warden, responsible for a patrol district in the Hill Country west of Pecan Springs. But Lanny had learned pretty quickly that while his was a nine-to-five job, his wife was on call around the clock, with nighttime patrols routine from September through February and frequent during the summer. For a while, they had loved each other enough to keep trying to make it work, especially when they’d been hopeful enough to imagine fitting a baby into Mack’s complicated schedule.

  But then a potentially dangerous encounter with a badass hunter had demonstrated to Lanny that his wife’s service weapon was not there for show. “I’m sorry, but I just can’t live with the fear that you’ll leave on patrol one night and won’t come home,” he’d said disconsolately. Not long after that, he told her he had met somebody else.

  Mack didn’t fight for the marriage. She wasn’t sure there was anything left worth fighting for, and when Lanny made it clear that her career was the price of their reconciliation, she knew what she had to do. She thought about it for all of thirty seconds, offered Lanny his freedom, and put in for a transfer. It didn’t much matter where in Texas she went, so long as it was close to what passed for wilderness these days. When the transfer to Uvalde County was offered, she had said an immediate yes.

  And that’s how she had ended up in Utopia. Now, driving down the shadowy street, appreciating its early-morning peace and quiet, she reached down to the truck’s cup holder and picked up the mug of hot coffee. Utopia was one of those blink-and-you-miss-it towns, on a road that didn’t go much of anywhere. But from time to time it became a “destination town,” and the streets weren’t always as quiet as they were this morning. The golf course south of town pulled golfers in for tournaments, and there was the Open Pro Rodeo at the park, the annual Utopia Arts and Crafts Fair, and various barbecue and chili and Dutch oven cook-offs, all of it with plenty of dancing and country music. During dove and deer seasons, weekend hunters wearing camo crowded into the café or picked up supplies at the General Store. There had even been a movie, Seven Days in Utopia. Mack hadn’t been in Utopia when the film was shot, but she’d heard that it stirred up a potful of excitement—which it would, of course, since it had brought Robert Duvall and Melissa Leo to town. Dozens of Utopians had been employed as extras, and there were snapshots of the stars and the cast and crew plastered all over one of the café’s walls.

  But the biggest excitement in the past couple of months had been the mountain lion that had added the town to its territory, snatching a puppy out of a resident’s backyard and killing a goat tethered to a clothesline. The lion—a young adul
t male weighing around a hundred pounds—had even been seen prowling along Cypress Street, on the fringes of the town park. People were spooked and rightly so, Mack knew. An adult lion needed eight to ten pounds of meat every day to survive. And a hungry lion might not be particular about who or what was on the menu, as an article in the Uvalde Leader-News had recently warned, pointing out that a four-year-old child had been attacked and killed by a mountain lion in the Rio Grande Valley just six months before.

  But prowling lions aside, when the movie shoot was over and all the golfers and rodeo riders and tourists and cook-off champs and hunters had left, Utopia was once again transformed into a quiet, modest, back-in-time village—sort of like the mythical Brigadoon that Mack had seen in a movie. It vaulted into the twenty-first century on weekends and slipped back into the nineteenth century during the week.

  Like Brigadoon, Utopia had waxed and waned, fading in and out of the gauzy mists that drifted through the Sabinal River Canyon on cool autumn mornings. In the 1790s, the Spanish found silver and dug a mine shaft in Sugarloaf Mountain but hurried back south when the Indians—Comanches, Tonkawas, Kickapoo, and Lipan Apaches—gave them a hard time. The first Anglo settler arrived in 1852. In spite of sporadic Indian raids, more settlers followed, and by 1880, the village boasted 150 citizens and a weekly stage, a post office, a cotton gin, two gristmills, a blacksmith shop, a general merchandise store, three churches, and a half-dozen saloons. The telephone came to town in 1914, and electricity arrived after the Second World War, although paved roads took a while longer. The population dropped to sixty when the decade-long dry spell of the 1950s droughted out many of the old ranches, but the state’s rising prosperity in the following decades delivered a recreation boom to the area. Tourism—and Utopia—began to flourish. And so did hunting and fishing, now a fifteen-billion-dollar industry in Texas. Around Utopia these days, a rancher could make more money hawking hunting leases than he could selling beef, wool, or mohair, which had once been the county’s cash crops.