Endangered Species

by Barr, Nevada

  “Waiting isn’t going to make it any easier,” he said, and pulled the handle on his door. Anna noticed he didn’t actually push it open till he satisfied himself that she was going to do the same. Her earlier cowardice had not gone unnoticed. To redeem herself, she stepped smartly from the truck and walked around the tailgate.

  Wooden stairs, added in recent years as a fire escape and to provide private access to the apartment, led up to the second floor. Tabby Belfore had come onto the small landing outside the screen door. The sun was behind her, shining through the thin fabric of her summer dress and her fine blond hair. The dress was pale yellow and sheer, very much like her hair. Backlit, the clothing appeared burned away, only a halo left surrounding her narrow shoulders and swollen belly. To Anna she was beautiful, reminiscent of a stunning painting she’d once seen by Gustav Klimt of a pregnant nude veiled in crimped auburn hair. Anna found herself running up the steep steps, suddenly afraid Tabby would fall.

  “You’re Anna, aren’t you?” Tabby began, knowing the answer but feeling the need to make hostess noises.

  “Yes. Fire crew.” Anna had reached the top and, standing between Tabby and the stairs, felt both relieved and foolish. Chief Ranger Hull pushed up behind her and she was glad to turn the situation over to him.

  “May we step inside, Mrs. Belfore?” Hull asked courteously.

  All was not well and Tabby sensed it. Her delicate face closed like a poppy at sundown. Wordlessly she backed into the hallway between the stairs and the kitchen. A gentleman, Norman Hull held the door and Anna was forced to enter next.

  Tabby closed both hands on her skirt, crumpling the fabric above her knees. She continued to back away till a kitchen chair stopped her.

  “Why don’t we sit?” Anna said gently.

  Obediently, Tabby lowered herself onto the seat. She looked for all the world like a waif expecting to be beaten. Her eyes were downcast, her fingers clutching convulsively, her shoulders pinched up around her ears as if to ward off a blow.

  She didn’t ask a single question.

  “We have some rather bad news,” Hull said. Anna willed him to kneel, bend down, anything to close the gulf between Tabby Belfore and himself. Though the kitchen was small, the space loomed like a gulf and Anna could imagine Mrs. Belfore pitching face forward into it. Quietly she slipped behind the chair, sat on her heels and rested her elbows on her knees, forming human arms to the straight-backed chair that held Tabby. The girl seemed unaware Anna was not part of the furniture. Her fingers loosed the flimsy dress and closed around Anna’s wrist.

  Still she didn’t look up and she didn’t ask for the news.

  “Todd has been killed in an airplane crash,” Hull said evenly. “We are terribly sorry for your loss. If there’s—”

  Tabby’s head jerked up, her mouth slightly open; a quick look at the chief ranger, away, and again the look. A classic double take so out of place, the beginnings of a laugh were startled out of Anna’s throat. The laughter went on and for an instant Anna thought she’d gone off her rocker, but it was Tabby who was laughing. Anna got ready to grab the girl if she had to.

  Abruptly, the laughter stopped. “No. Not Todd,” Tabby said. “That’s not funny.”

  Norman Hull slowly turned his Stetson around, running the brim through his fingers. His face was working overtime: the eyebrows up, a sudden grimace. Despite the tic, concern was clear in his eyes. “The drug interdiction plane crashed and the pilot was killed,” Hull began again. This time Tabby was nodding as if she understood, as if she was taking the information in.

  “Todd was with him. We’re pretty sure he didn’t feel anything. Death was instantaneous.”

  Tabby sat stone-still. Anna shifted her weight. Her right leg was going to sleep. Hull looked at her for help or corroboration but she merely shrugged. Tabby had heard. There was nothing to do but wait.

  “Todd wasn’t with him,” Tabby said finally. Neither Anna nor Norman Hull replied. Tabby looked from one to the other, the emotions on her face as readable as those of a very young child: disbelief, rage, fear. And something else. The last one, Anna couldn’t read. It was how she imagined a woman’s face would look if her heart suddenly imploded and she had the misfortune to go on living.

  Another few seconds passed. Anna started to get to her feet. Tabby began screaming, raw bouts of desperation. Reaching up, she raked her fingers down her cheeks. The nails had been bitten to the quick but the force of the clawing left angry welts.

  Anna turned to Hull. “Get that helicopter. Get her out of here. To a hospital.”

  The chief ranger nodded, put his Stetson square on his head, and left the kitchen. Anna could hear his boots clattering down the wooden stairs to the truck where he’d left his radio.

  Tabby’s screams sawed out with the regularity of breath. Anna caught hold of her hands but the fingers remained stiff and curled as if she were still tearing at her face. Twice Anna begged her to stop. The screams went on and the moment Anna loosed her hands the rending of the flesh began again.

  “Come on, come on, take it easy, we’ll get you through this.” Anna was murmuring the words she’d murmured to a hundred shaken and injured people over the years. She scarcely heard her own voice.

  A coffee cup sat on the drainboard, an inch of cold coffee scummed with milk in it. Anna dumped it and refilled it with cold water. In a sudden snapping movement she threw it in Tabby’s face.

  Abruptly the screaming stopped. Tabby’s hands transformed back into something resembling human appendages. Spluttering like one nearly drowned, she wiped the water from the front of her dress.

  “You can’t do this,” Anna said quietly. “Much as you want to, you can’t fall apart now.”

  Tabby smoothed her hands over her belly. The water made the fabric of the dress adhere to her skin and Anna could see a pulsing movement as if a tiny hand or foot pounded the ceiling for quiet.

  “Oh my God,” Tabby said. “Oh my dear God.” She didn’t cease to weep but the tears came silently, mixing with the water Anna had thrown, dripping off her jaws and down the bodice of her dress.

  Anna pulled up a second chair and sat knee to knee with Tabby, ready to catch her if she fell.

  They were still sitting like that when the helicopter came.

  CHAPTER Eight

  NAKED, ANNA STOOD on the shore. Warm wavelets licked at her bare toes like friendly puppies. There was just enough breeze so she could feel the air moving across her skin. Dusk had come and gone and the cloak of night gave her privacy for this ultimate freedom. She marveled at how different life was without clothes on; better—at least until it grew cold or buggy. For modern Victorians—a culture that kept nudity in darkened movie theaters linked always with sex and more often than not with violence—to be outdoors and naked was exhilarating, wild, dangerous.

  Particularly for a woman alone.

  Anna pushed that thought aside. It was media-borne and not usually true. Fear sold ad space and so television and the newspapers mainlined it.

  For a long ways out the ocean was shallow, and she walked sixty yards before the water came to her waist. Stars overhead, stars on the water, she sank down and let the sea lift her. The rubber bands that held her braids had been cut and the insistent pulse of the ocean unraveled her smoke-matted hair. Something, seaweed maybe, slunk past her left leg, touching the back of her knee. She added sharks to the list of things she refused to think about. Fear was a burglar, breaking into one’s mind, stealing away peace. Mentally she bolted her doors and drifted with the night.

  The fire was out, the bodies bagged; yellow police tape cordoned off the crash site. Though Anna had never worked a plane wreck before, the dead and dying were not strangers to her. The twisting roads of Mesa Verde National Park and the straight fast highway through the southern edge of the Guadalupe Mountains had claimed their share of motorists. There had even been a man burned to death in a wildfire she’d worked in California. But he’d been totally consumed, reduced to elemen
tal ash.

  What was troubling Anna was the pilot’s right ear. That pink, human ear nestled in the carnage. The image would take a while to fade. Weeks would pass before the sight of a shrimp in a nest of fettuccine or a dried apricot among the peanuts was rendered harmless.

  Lowering her feet to the sandy bottom, Anna spread her legs and leaned into the sleepy surf, reveling in the sensual thrill of water against her skin. The moon crept misshapen over the horizon, spilling its light across the Atlantic. Twining it through her fingers, Anna wove strands of gold into the dark salt water, enjoying the mindless play.

  AFTER THE FIRE had been declared out and the brass and the medics and the machinery had ferried each other back to the mainland, Guy had gathered the crew together.

  “Bear with me now. I’ve had the training, but this is the first time I’ve had to use it,” he’d said as he stood in front of the house that served as the fire dorm. His face was blackened from soot. Kept clean by his hard hat, his head gleamed in the growing dusk. Propping one foot on the stump of a tree cut nearly level with the ground, he rocked slowly, thinking.

  Legs dangling like children, Anna and Dijon sat side by side on the tailgate of the pumper truck. Rick leaned against a fender and Al sat on one of the coolers, methodically packing his pipe.

  A southern evening trickled in from the east, filling the cracks between the shadows with soothing darkness. Drought had knocked the mosquitoes to their knees and only an occasional bloodthirsty whine pierced the tranquillity. Stars had yet to shine and the sky was colorless with the abdication of the sun.

  Air-conditioning, sofas, lights, window screens—all were less than twenty feet away but no one thought to move the meeting indoors. For the five of them, tailgates and trucks were familiar ground, closer to home than strange quarters.

  “You’ve all heard of critical-incident stress management?” Guy asked, looking around for a neutral spot where he could aim a stream of tobacco juice. “Anybody ever been through a session?” Everybody but Dijon raised a hand. “Good. Then help me out. You pretty much know the drill. Anybody want to go first?”

  Ten seconds ticked by; then Rick said: “It’s a crock of shit, if you ask me.”

  Anna felt a stab of anger on Guy’s behalf but the crew boss took Rick’s words in stride, recognizing them for what they signified: discomfort. This new touchy-feely stuff had yet to be embraced by some of the rank and file.

  Hands on hips, Guy stared upward a moment; a man collecting his thoughts. “Then why don’t you just kind of be here in case somebody needs you to listen, okay, Rick?” he said at last. “We won’t be doing group hugs or nothing.”

  Rick was nailed in by that. No face lost. Nothing to bluster against. He propped an elbow on the edge of the truck bed and tried to look superior.

  Anna understood the impulse. She didn’t want to talk about her feelings either. Maybe nobody else shared them. Maybe they weren’t good enough. Maybe it was nobody’s damn business. Maybe they were inappropriate; that was the fear that silenced most people.

  Goaded by fear of fear, Anna decided to go first. “I was afraid the widow was going to drop that baby right then and there.”

  Nods all around. Nobody outraged. It was just a thought. Anna felt a little bad for referring to Tabby Belfore as “the widow.” Just distancing herself, she guessed.

  Half a minute crept by, tension stretching the seconds till Anna swore she could feel herself aging, but she was damned if she was going to go first twice.

  “Hanson bothered me,” Dijon blurted out.

  “Yeah? Why?” Anna knew that Guy, ever diligent to his duties as crew boss, was trying to coax. He was following the book. But being born a booted, hard-hatted man, there was a lack of conviction. Like a good soldier he followed orders, even those he didn’t thoroughly comprehend.

  It didn’t matter. Dijon answered anyway and that was what counted, the talking. “He was so fucking ‘Ho, ho, ho.’ ” Dijon had forgotten to clean up his language in front of a lady. He must have been upset. “Then he’d go all fakey, undertaker-sad.”

  “Maybe he didn’t know what else to do,” Al said.

  “He’s a dirtbag,” Rick said.

  More silence followed, less strained this time. Night was flowing from the east. The anonymity bestowed by darkness eased their minds.

  “I don’t figure anybody was still alive by the time we got there,” Dijon said tentatively. The hope in his voice seemed to crystallize all their thoughts. Finding dead bodies—even fresh ones—was one thing, but to be there, helpless witness to the migration of souls, was something else entirely.

  TRANSMUTED FROM GOLD to silver, the moon had shrunk to the size of a dime. The dunes were white with its light. Silhouetted against the sands, a small herd of horses walked north in single file: a stallion—even at this distance Anna could see impressive equipment drooping nearly to his hocks—five mares, and two foals. The Cumberland horses; the herd numbered close to three hundred animals. For decades they’d run wild on the island. They were part of the lore, part of the allure, part of the history. And a dilemma for the NPS. The fragile dune and interdune structures hadn’t evolved to cope with equine depredation. Hardened hooves of these exotic beasts destroyed the delicate plant life that held the sand in place. Their enormous appetites grazed down the vegetation between dune and forest, and the sand was migrating inland, smothering the fresh-water lakes.

  It would be political suicide to kill them and economic folly to deport them. Blessedly uninvolved in higher management, Anna chose to float on the tide and enjoy them.

  Not for the first time the scene in the Belfores’ kitchen played through her mind. Tabby’s reaction had bothered Anna at the time. In retrospect it seemed even stranger and she wondered if Tabby had slipped a cog under the strain.

  In her years as a park ranger, Anna had delivered her share of bad news. People took the hit in a lot of ways. The storm of grief had been expected. The denial wasn’t out of place. Tabby’s sudden laughter, though jarring, hadn’t been particularly alarming. Comedy of the absurd was based on the fact that what startles may very well get a laugh.

  Lazily, Anna looked toward shore. The horses were gone. So was the ATV she’d borrowed to come to the beach. A jolt of adrenaline disturbed her calm till she spotted it where she’d left it. A strong current, scarcely felt in so large a body of water, was carrying her north, parallel to the island.

  The beach was devoid of humanity but not of life. Minute skittering, too far away for Anna to identify, attested to abundant activity. Ghost crabs probably; maybe even baby loggerhead turtles from an earlier laying, though she doubted it. Marty Schlessinger would have been in attendance had that been the case. And, too, the nests tended to be farther north, east of where the drug interdiction plane went in.

  Anna’s thoughts had come full circle, back to the accident and its aftermath. Back to Tabby Belfore’s kitchen. She recommenced playing “What’s wrong with this picture?” In a moment she hit on it. It wasn’t the surprise, the laughter, or the denial, but that they had come late—a split second too late. Tabby had been waiting for bad news, just not the bad news she got.

  What, if anything, that portended, Anna wasn’t sure.

  Rolling over onto her belly, she let the waves carry her shoreward till her fingers touched bottom. The deliciously wicked and wonderful sensation enveloped her again as she wandered nude down the shoreline, turning now and again to watch the moon fill her watery footprints with silver.

  CHAPTER Nine

  FREDERICK SAT STARING at the old black rotary phone. A corner of the coffee table was cleared of the ubiquitous slither of magazines to accommodate it. In the bedroom of his small Chicago apartment dwelt all the FBI agent’s high-tech communications equipment: fax, modem, answering machine, Touch-Tone cordless. But when he really wanted to talk, he came to the rotary. It had heft and substance. He could press the round receiver to his ear and shut out the world, whisper into the cupped mouthpiece and
feel close to the other end of the line.

  Staring at the lump of plastic, still warm from Anna’s call, he was dismayed to think how much of his life—social, family, business, and love—was conducted over the phone.

  Danny and Taters fluttered down from the magazines stacked on the mantel over a fireplace broadcasting the soulless life of a television on mute. The budgerigars, one blue, one green, pecked around the base of the telephone. Frederick had the bachelor’s habit of dining in front of the TV and there was usually a tidbit to be had about this time of the evening.

  Danny, the blue budgie, had Anna Pigeon to thank for Taters. When Frederick had become enamored of Anna he’d taken pity on Danny’s isolation and bought him a ladyfriend. The girl at the pet shop, still in high school and no more a judge of bird gender than Frederick, had lost her fifty-fifty gamble. Still it was a happy ending. The birds were close as brothers.

  Making squeaky noises with his lips, Frederick put out his finger. Danny hopped aboard and looked at him with one bright eye. Piedmont, Anna’s tomcat, would devour his feathered friends if ever he got the chance. Frederick hoped that wasn’t a metaphor for his relationship with the little ranger.

  He smiled at the word. It never crossed Anna’s mind that she was little. Probably she’d be offended if he suggested it. He had learned to be careful around her. If he picked up one end of a piano she’d run around to lift the other. One day she was going to hurt herself. One day she was going to get herself killed.

  Frederick sat with that thought for a moment. Danny flew to the top of his head and scratched a cascade of baby-fine hair over his forehead. It tickled the bridge of his nose. Time for a haircut. Absently he shoved it and an agitated budgie back.

  Life without Anna, at least tethered to his heart by phone line, was not unthinkable. Unfortunately, at forty-five with twenty-three years in law enforcement, there was very little left that was unthinkable. But living alone had grown tiresome, the long-distance relationship a lonely and irritating compromise. “I wish Anna liked the city,” he said to the bird on his head. “Or I liked dirt and bugs and thousands of square miles of nothing.”