Ill Wind

by Nevada Barr

  There’d been two fatalities—both elderly visitors with cardiopulmonary problems—and eleven ambulance runs, five of them out of Cliff Palace. And it was only early June.

  Swallowing the last of her wine, Anna leaned back and let the alcohol uncoil her mental springs.

  Jennifer wandered back to the TV with a fresh beer.

  Short was a round-faced woman with good hair, bad skin, and too much makeup. Fresh out of Tennessee State’s one-semester course, she was the new law enforcement seasonal in her first national park job. Jennifer was a Memphis belle in what Anna had thought was a bygone tradition: all magnolia blossoms, little-ol’-me’s-led-a-sheltered-life, and eeka-mouse . Proven tactics, guaranteed to turn the boys to putty.

  Anna hadn’t yet decided whether she was more irritated or intrigued with the femme fatale routine. On the one hand it would be interesting to watch. On the other, given the job, it could get a person killed.

  “Jamie, I saw that poor little thing you were talking about,” Jennifer was saying. Or, to be more accurate: “Ah saw thet pore lil’ thang yew were tawkin’ abaht.”

  “She had the cutest face, but her little body! I just couldn’t live like that. High school is going to be pure hell. It’d be a mercy to drown people like that at birth. I don’t want to sound mean, I mean for their own sakes. I wouldn’t want to live like that. I just wouldn’t.”

  A natural silence fell and they all stared at Vanna. Jennifer had been talking about Stacy and Rose Meyers’ daughter, Bella. A sadness threatened Anna and she was glad when loud knocking interrupted her thoughts. She made no move to uncoil herself. Jennifer sprang up, “I’ll get it” out of her mouth almost before the knocking ceased. The first week on the mesa she had announced one of her prime motives for choosing law enforcement: a way to meet straight men.

  A moment later two seasonal firefighters from the helitack crew followed Jennifer back in. Because of the wealth of ruins and artifacts on the mesa all wildfires were put out in their infancy by a crew of wildland firefighters flown in by helicopter. Dozers and other heavy equipment customarily used to cut fireline would be so destructive to the cultural aspects of the park that fire was never allowed to spread if it could be helped. When nothing was burning, helitack performed the high- and low-angle rescues often needed to evacuate sick and injured people from the less accessible ruins.

  Jimmy Russell and Paul Summers had the youth and build of most seasonal firefighters and the living room fairly crackled with sexual energy. Russell’s heavily muscled arms and back were shown off in a tight T-shirt emblazoned with a flying insect wearing a yellow shirt of fire-resistant Nomex. A budding good ol’ boy from Kentucky, Jimmy chewed his words like tobacco. Summers was a striking blond with a born-again surfer haircut and finely chiseled features. Somehow managing to look sophisticated in worn Levi’s and a baggy, wrinkled, oxford shirt, he carried the libations: a six-pack of Coors Light dangled from each hand.

  “Hiya, Anna.” Paul smiled at her and she was annoyed to find herself flattered.

  Popping a Coors, Russell settled cross-legged on the carpet. Jamie pulled herself around on the couch and began kneading the muscles of his neck and shoulders.

  Let the mating rituals begin, Anna thought sourly. Unfolding her legs, she levered herself up: time to go visit Piedmont.

  On the way through the kitchen she grabbed up what was left of the Mirassou Blanc.

  FRIEDA Dierkz had a house in what was called the Utility Loop. It was near the maintenance yard, about a mile from the Headquarters/Museum Loop. The houses were small, white one- and two-bedroom homes with the charm and inconveniences of 1940s construction. These homes were for lower-level permanents, the GS-4s and -5s and -7s. Higher-ups claimed the beautiful historic homes in the Headquarters Loop. The fire dorm, where helitack was housed, was also on the loop, as were a couple of aging trailers rented out to seasonal interpreters each summer.

  Frieda lived in number thirty-four. Most of the front yards were overgrown with weeds and native grasses. Her marigold border and tended lawn looked out of place in piñon-juniper country.

  A sad-eyed black lab was resting on some newly dug up and soon to be dead marigolds. He thumped his tail half-heartedly as Anna came up the walk.

  “Hi, Taco.” She stopped to pat him on the head. The dog yawned widely to show his appreciation. “Where’s Piedmont?” Anna demanded, cradling the animal’s jowly face between her hands. “Don’t tell me you’ve eaten him?”

  “Alive and well.” Frieda had come to the door and stood behind the screen. A large yellow tiger cat, so limp it looked dead, was draped across her arm. With her free hand she pushed open the door and let Anna in.

  Anna traded the wine bottle for the cat, buried her face in the soft fur of his neck, and breathed deeply. “Ahh. Thanks. I needed that.”

  “For me?” Frieda eyed the already opened bottle.

  “Park Service social motto: Bring something to share.”

  As Frieda went into the kitchen to get glasses, Anna sat down on a couch identical to the one in the Far View dormitory and spread the cat across her knees.

  Seasonals in the Park Service were not allowed the solace of pets. As long as Anna was stuck in the seasonal housing dorm, her cat had to board with a permanent employee fortunate enough to get “real” housing.

  Frieda returned with two Kmart wineglasses and poured them each a healthy slug.

  “If you’re in the middle of something, Piedmont and I can go out in the yard,” Anna offered. “I just needed a medicinal cat this evening.”

  “Don’t know what I’d do without Taco,” Frieda said by way of agreement. She propped her feet up on the scarred coffee table and took a long drink.

  “But Taco is only a dawg,” Anna confided to the cat in a stage whisper.

  The dispatcher laughed. It was a rare sound and surprisingly pleasant, close to what Anna and her sister, Molly, had called “the Princess Laugh” when they were children. A sound that put one in mind of tinkling bells. She and Molly had even spent time practicing it but had never graduated from girlish “tee hee hees.” Bells were for princesses. And, evidently, the Mesa Verde dispatcher.

  “When I see you with that cat I can hardly believe you’re the same hard-ass who tickets little old ladies in wheelchairs for parking their cars in the handicapped spaces without a permit,” Frieda said.

  Frieda was just making conversation but still Anna was stung. “I don’t,” she insisted but felt compelled to add: “How am I to know they’re handicapped? For all I know it could be Joe Namath parked there.”

  “Namath’s handicapped,” Frieda returned. “Bad knees.”

  “Gotta have a permit.”

  Again the dispatcher laughed her silvery laugh and they drank in silence. Tired of being adored, Piedmont leaped off Anna’s lap. Moments later they heard feline lappings from the direction of the bathroom bowl.

  “What do you know about Tom Silva?” Anna asked, her mind inevitably returning to NPS chores.

  Frieda thought for a moment. “Patsy was divorced when the superintendent hired her—last fall, November, I think. She brought the girls up to live with her when school ended in May, so Tom hasn’t been around much socially—not where you’d get to know the guy. I’ve seen him up here. He’s good-looking. Younger than Patsy, is my guess, but not by much—maybe thirty-five or so. Maybe just looks young. He’s got that kind of perfect olive skin that’s practically indestructible.”

  “Does he come up to visit the girls?”

  “More than Patsy would like. She thinks it’s just a ruse. I guess his lack of interest in his kids was part of the reason she left him. From hints she’s dropped, I gather Tom’s thirty-five going on seventeen. She once said she couldn’t handle being a single parent to three teenagers. Luckily he’s been doing roofing or framing or something for an outfit in Grand Junction. The two-hour commute keeps him down to a dull roar.”

  “The contractor putting in the new waterline just hired him
,” Anna said.

  “Oops.”

  “Yeah. Oops.” Piedmont came back and settled down on the couch just out of Anna’s reach. She contented herself with holding the tip of his tail. Occasionally he twitched it to show his displeasure.

  “Sulking,” Frieda noted, and Anna nodded. They sat for a while without speaking. It wasn’t a comfortable silence, at least not for Anna. She hadn’t known Frieda long enough for that.

  “Do you think Silva’s dangerous?” Anna asked.

  “Maybe. No—I don’t think so. He seems like a guy more into gestures.” Cutting off one’s foreskin was a hell of a gesture, Anna thought, but she didn’t interrupt. In park society a person’s private life seldom was, but as far as she knew Silva’s penis had not yet made it into the public domain.

  “The one time I met him he did strike me as a bit of an opportunist, though.”

  “Like a magpie? Won’t kill it but doesn’t mind eating it if someone else does?”

  “Exactly like that. You hit it. He even looks kind of like a magpie, dresses too well, talks too loud, struts.”

  Silence fell again. It was a little easier this time but after a minute or so the strain began to get to Anna. “I better go,” she said, giving Piedmont’s tail a last gentle tug. “I want to call my sister tonight and it’s already nine-twenty New York time. Thanks for the visit.”

  “Thanks for the wine,” Frieda replied as she followed Anna to the door.

  On the four-mile drive back to the dorm Anna found herself once again lonely for Christina and her daughter, missing Molly, missing silences that didn’t chafe.

  Fending off self-pity, she forced herself to concentrate on the delicate scent of juniper blowing in the Rambler’s window, the piles of cumulonimbus the setting sun was painting in glorious shades of peach, the glistening peaks of the La Plata mountains, still wearing a veil of winter snow.

  From many places the view was unchanged from when the ancients had inhabited the mesa. A time Anna liked to believe was simpler. Along Chapin Mesa Road were villages, skeletons now, but still imbued with an unmistakable human spirit. If she squinted, let her mind play, Anna could almost see women with bundles on their backs watching thunderheads build as she did, wondering if the rains would come in time for the corn.

  The considerable benefit of this environmental therapy was blasted away the moment the Rambler pulled into the dorm parking lot. The nucleus of people she had left had spontaneously combusted into a flaming beer party.

  Something that, to rock-and-roll-trained ears, sounded like 33⅓ Muzak played at 78 was audible through the open windows. Half a dozen cars were parked in the lot and at least that many bodies were standing around in the living room. Theatrically, Anna rested her head against the steering wheel and groaned.

  With ill-concealed bad grace, she slammed the car into reverse and drove back down the Chapin Mesa Road.

  A mile shy of the Museum Loop she turned onto a spur road, parked, and let herself into the Resource Management building. It was small and square, built of the same pink stone blocks as the chief ranger’s office. The single room was filled to capacity by two desks, filing cabinets, dead lizards, bones, rocks, and what had to be at least fourteen years’ worth of accumulated paperwork.

  For those lucky enough to have keys—the people who really needed them and law enforcement—Resource Management had the after-hours attraction of a private phone.

  Anna cleared off a chair and, still standing, punched in the twenty-four numbers of her sister’s home phone and her AT&T calling card. She suspected if she could clear her brain of all memorized numbers there would be space enough created for housing all of Shakespeare and some of Johnson.

  As Molly’s smoke-roughened voice growled a characteristic “Dr. Pigeon,” Anna dumped herself into the swivel chair.

  “I’m too old for this,” she said in lieu of a greeting.

  “Damn old,” Molly agreed.

  “Too damned old. If it wasn’t politically incorrect, I’d get my eyes done.”

  “On an NPS salary you could only afford to do one.”

  “Some psychiatrist you are. Whatever happened to ‘You’re as young as you feel’ and ‘Age is just a state of mind’?”

  Molly laughed, a chuckle that sounded evil to the uninitiated. “That’s what young psychiatrists tell their middle-aged clients. I’m pushing fifty. Take it from me: damn, yes, it’s a bitch. Gird up the sagging loins and get on with it. Come to New York. I’ll buy you a day at Elizabeth Arden’s. ‘Behind the Red Door’: not quite an erotic fantasy but one that sells just as well. Youth! Men want to buy back the dreams they once had of themselves. Us old bats like the dreams of our middling years, it’s our faces we want to buy back.

  “So, one foot in the grave, the other on a banana peel. How’s the rest of your life?”

  Anna laughed. Her face could fall, her hands gnarl, her hair acquire another streak of gray. The camaraderie of women on the wrong side of Mademoiselle’s hit list was a joy she’d never been taught to expect.

  “Dorm living is a drag. I’m leaning hard on the district ranger.”

  “Hills Dutton.”

  “I was trying to avoid the name.”

  “Got to be an alias.”

  “Nope. Too imaginative. Forced to think up an alias, I expect Hills would ponder a good long time, read all the Standard Operating Procedures, then settle on John Doe.”

  “Is he going to get you a house?”

  “I don’t know. To give the devil his due, he’s up against it. They’re redoing a waterline laid down a zillion years ago. A whole passel of archaeologists have been brought on board to analyze every foot of the digging. No housing left, everybody’s hair in a knot, heavy equipment roaring around.”

  The waterline put Anna in mind of the afternoon’s drama and she was glad to unfold the story of Patsy’s Tom and the piece of foreskin.

  After she’d finished there was a silence broken by a sighing sound. Molly was lighting up. Camel straights: Anna had heard them sucked into her sister’s lungs for twenty years. Molly was an MD, she knew what the cigarettes were doing. She was a psychiatrist, she knew why she smoked them. And Anna was in law enforcement, she knew drugs had a logic of their own. So she said nothing.

  “Sounds like the man’s in trouble,” Molly said finally, and Anna imagined thick smoke coming out with the words. “A construction worker?”

  “That’s what I gathered.”

  “Not a likely candidate for voluntary therapy. Any alcohol problems, drugs, things of that sort?”

  “Probably,” Anna replied, then thought better of her prejudice and added: “I don’t know, really. I’ve heard he goes on a drunk now and then.”

  “People who cut themselves—hurt themselves—usually have a problem with self-esteem. A healthier attitude is ‘Damned if I’m going to hurt anymore over you.’ He may be harmless. I’m talking physically here; emotionally he could be devastating to anybody who gets tangled up with him. But now and again it goes beyond self-injury. In extreme cases I’ve seen the murder/suicide pattern. Shoot the wife then shoot yourself. That’s rare but not so rare it doesn’t crop up in the case history books and on the front page of the Post fairly regularly.

  “I’d tell her to watch him, Anna. Watch him and watch herself. Whoops. Got to go,” Molly finished in the abrupt manner Anna’d grown accustomed to over the years. “I’ve got an article due tomorrow for the Times on co-dependency. An are-you-or-aren’t-you kind of thing. Of course it turns out everybody is. Keep me posted.” She rang off, leaving Anna still holding the phone to her ear.

  Shoot the wife then shoot yourself. Anna hung up the phone. Before she wrote Mr. Silva off as a magpie she’d do a little digging. It hadn’t escaped her notice that more than a third of the women who came to hospital emergency rooms for treatment had been damaged by husbands or boyfriends.

  Full darkness had come and she drove slowly back up to Far View. Cottontail bunnies, scarcely bigger than kitt
ens, tried to find their way into the next world under her tires, but she successfully avoided them.

  At the dorm, the parking lot was still full, the noise still blaring, and the bodies still in evidence. Anna slumped down in the Rambler’s seat, wondering not for the first time if she should have taken the promotion that, along with Chris’s defection, had tempted her back to the southwest, whether the seductive sense of smug selflessness and the warm dry climate had been worth the trade-offs.

  THREE

  BEFORE SHE’D PROPERLY GOTTEN TO SLEEP, ANNA’S alarm was buzzing like a hornet. She swatted it into silence and lay for a minute staring at the acoustical-tile ceiling above her single bed. The beer party had clanged on well past midnight.

  Now that she had to get up the house was finally quiet. Rolling up on one elbow, she looked out into the new day. A breeze blew cold on her naked skin. At eighty-two hundred feet, summer never got a firm foothold. Chapin Mesa, a thousand feet lower than Far View, was often as much as ten degrees warmer.

  A family of chipmunks had taken up residence under a scrap of black plastic Maintenance left behind when they finished the rear deck. With much flipping of tails, chattering, and scurrying, they were maintaining their cute Disneyesque image. Anna’d been so inculcated with Chip and Dale that she’d felt betrayed when she’d first seen a chipmunk breakfasting on a luckless brother squashed in the road. Roadkill provided food for a lot of animals. Anna sometimes speculated as to whether or not scavengers looked upon highways as a sort of endless buffet catered by Chrysler.

  Squeaks, flusters, and the chipmunks vanished under the plastic. A lone red-tailed hawk spun careful circles over the serviceberry bushes.

  A toilet flushed. The dorm was stirring earlier than anticipated. Leaving the chipmunks to their fate, Anna pulled on her robe. This morning she intended not only to get a shower, but also a hot one.