Nevada Barr - Anna Pigeon 08 - Deep South

by Deep South (lit)

  He left, closing the door behind him. For a couple of minutes, she rocked gently in her chair and reviewed their meeting. It had gone well.

  Unless Thigpen started working on Barth again, she suspected he'd be a good ranger. They could work together.

  Her radio crackled: Randy making a vehicle stop at mile marker thirty-four. He was on his way toward the ranger station working traffic. Rather than summon him into her presence via the radio, Anna decided to wait. However her meeting with Randy Thigpen went, she doubted it would go as well as the one with Barth. Barth seemed more of a get-along-go-along guy. Randy struck her as a hardcore malcontent.

  Twenty minutes later, she heard the door slam and left her office.

  She didn't want Barth to talk with Randy before she did.

  Thigpen had come in with a cigarette in his hand. When he saw her, he made a show of suddenly remembering it, opening the door, and tossing the smoking butt outside, adding littering to his list of crimes and misdemeanors.

  "Randy," Anna said. "Could you come into my office? There are some things we need to go over." In one management book or another, Anna had read that publicly shaming an employee was a sure-fire morale breaker.

  Besides, capitalizing on the pack mentality went against the grain.

  "Lemme get a cup of coffee," Thigpen said.

  Anna nodded and returned to her chair. Thigpen was playing his own version of the game she'd abandoned with Barth: making her wait, showing his independence. It bothered Anna not at all. She busied herself picking out the odd bits of paraphernalia previous district rangers had allowed to congeal in the shallow center drawer of the built-in desk.

  After about three times as long as it takes to pour and condiment a cup of coffee, Thigpen wandered in, smoothing his mustache as he came. He had a habit of stroking it down in such a way that it looked like he was smelling his fingers. "Why don't you go ahead and close the door," Anna suggested." Ah. Fixin' to get serious?

  Over one lousy cigarette?" Anna said nothing. Randy closed the door and took the chair Barth had recently vacated. Middle-aged, too much lard, most of it carried above the belt and in front, Randy was never going to be poster boy for the American Heart Association. He was a cardiac arrest waiting to happen. Dead-end job. Wife deserted him. New boss.

  Anna tried to let the ameliorating factors leaven her mood.

  She still didn't like the guy "How's your dog?" Randy asked. "He's going to make it, but he lost the rear leg the alligator bit." Good start, asking about Taco. It was on the tip of her tongue to thank him for the help he'd given her that night, but she suspected that was what he was angling for, so she didn't.

  "We got a problem," she said, echoing her opening with Barth.

  Randy fought with filibuster. clog ing the room with words, cruising easily from one excuse to another. Finally, when Anna pinned him down to the facts: she'd called, he'd been close, he hadn't come, he painted a picture she could tell he liked. Using much in the way of implication and innuendo, he suggested that he knew Anna was in no real danger and in his infinite and benevolent wisdom he'd decided it would be good for her to learn to handle things by herself, help her gain confidence. Of course, had he known she was going to do a fool thing like draw down on those innocent lads, he'd have come right on out and taken over before she got herself in trouble.

  Anna thought wistfully about that heart attack, wondered what in the hell was taking it so long. But then, should he collapse, she'd be duty-bound to give him CPR and the thought of mouth-to-mouth was so vile she decided it was better he should live. "We'll keep this simple," she said, giving up hope of a meaningful conversation.

  "Another ranger calls for backup and you don't move heaven and earth to get there in a timely manner, you will be given a written reprimand. Do it again, and you'll be fired." Randy sat back as if she'd slapped him-or woken him from a pleasant dream. "You can't do that!"

  "I can," Anna assured him. She had him sign the memo she'd prepared saying he had been counseled and he left.

  Maybe he'd shape up. Maybe not. No goodwill to lose, she didn't care which way it went.

  T he Bogachitta Lumber Company was situated four miles west of Port Gibson. It had once been on a navigable bayou, but over the years the Army Corps of Engineers had altered the course of the Mississippi, and now the mill sat near a swampy creek scarcely deep enough to drown a cottonmouth.

  Anna'd grown up in a logging town in Northern California, and Bogachitta Mills had the rustic look she'd come to expect of the industry.

  Computers might have invaded the offices, but the yards were still places of saws, piled logs, evil-smelling ponds and men who worked hard for their wages.

  Barth was driving, Anna riding shotgun. Most places she'd worked, at least the places with cars, the men had loved patrolling with her; she had no competitive need to drive. Left to her own devices, she preferred to look out the window, watch the world go by and think her own thoughts. Her ideal was never to patrol in an automobile at all.

  Cars cut rangers off from the natural world, blunted their senses and, Anna was convinced, over time, by some alchemy of metal and glass, turned them from rangers into cops.

  The crunching of tires on gravel announced their arrival. Barth parked in front of a derelict flat-roofed building with faded blue letters proclaiming Bogachitta Mills. Inside was a single desk, a computer and a woman in her late fifties or early sixties with cotton candy blond curls high on her head. A pack of Virginia Slims lay next to an ashtray full of dead compatriots. The most recent sacrifice burned in a groove put in the glass for that purpose.

  "Sean's out in the field today," she informed them, then coughed through a throat full of phlegm. If she wondered what they wanted with the Doolittles, she hid her curiosity remarkably well. So well, Anna wondered if the long arm of the law reaching out to Bogachitta Mills employees was a common occurrence. Recovered from her coughing fit, the woman said: "Jackie's out on the chipper. You can go ahead out, but ya'll gotta wear hard hats." Anna and Barth each took a yellow plastic hard hat from the row she indicated with a red porcelain nail and left their Stetsons in their places.

  Finding the chipper did not challenge the detecting skills. The machine, full-sized trees being stuffed into its maw by two men and a Caterpillar armed with a giant pincer claw, made a horrific racket.

  Envying the men their ear protection, Anna stood with her fingers in her ears watching once living plants reduced to mulch. Years before, she remembered, a man in the Northeast had murdered his wife, frozen her body and fed it through a wood chipper. Seeing one in action brought the old story home in a graphic way. "Yuck," she said, her editorializing lost in the din.

  Several shattering minutes passed before the heavy equipment operator saw them and signaled to someone out of sight behind the chipper, and the operation was shut down. The ensuing silence was a palpable balm that flowed into the yard in a sweet wash, loosening the muscles Anna had tightened in an attempt to keep the noise from rattling the core of her being.

  Under hard hats and protective eye wear and ear wear, the men were almost anonymous. Almost. Anna had recognized Jackson Doolittle as one of the two men high on the lip of the chipper guiding logs into its gullet. He saw them the instant the chipper shut down and started to jump off the back side out of sight. "Jackie!" Barth called before Anna could speak. "Miss. Loretta wants to know what you've gone and done with her car." Doolittle stopped, catching on to the chipper for balance.

  "Come on down," Barth said reasonably. "We'll get your mama's car back to her. But you need to talk to this lady here. Come on, now." Jackson Doolittle hadn't struck Anna as being burdened by an excess of brain cells, but it seemed even be finally realized there wasn't much point in running off again unless he planned to run from his job, his home and probably the only life he'd ever known.

  He jumped heavily to the ground. "Takin' a smoke break, Billy," be said to the operator of the mechanized claw.

  Doolittle led the way to
a picnic table in the shade of a tree that had grown draggled and downcast from watching the fate of its fellows. The mill worker sat on the table, his feet on the bench.

  Anna braced one foot up on the bench and waited. She was curious to see what he'd say without the guidance of a question. Barth didn't jump into the silence, and she was impressed.

  Fortified by a deep drag from a Marlboro he'd fished from the pack and lit, Doolittle said: "How much trouble am I in?"

  "Quite a bit," Anna replied. "Is Mama going to get her car back?"

  "That depends."

  "Ma'am, I'm sorry me and Sean run off like that." He looked up through his smoke, and Anna saw the startling green of his eyes, green as a cat's. All cats are gray in the dark-she'd not noticed them before.

  "Mike was starting to show his butt. When he gets like that there's no tellin' what he'll do. We got scared is all. I mean, I knew you could find me if you wanted to," he added, as if this made running away null and void. "When Mike gets like what?" Anna asked.

  Jackson looked at the tip of his cigarette. Finding no answer there, he searched the new leaves overhead, already weighed down with the ephemeral tragedies of life. "Oh, I don't know. Like that. You know."

  "No. I don't know. Was he going to hurt me?" A long silence followed.

  Jackson searched the places that had failed to provide answers before.

  They failed him again. In the harsh light of April, with the dirt of the day's work on his face, Jackson looked like what he was, little more than a boy. "I don't know," be repeated his mantra. "Maybe. Mike gets kind of crazy when he's been... when he's... you know... "

  "Coked up?" Anna suggested. "Liquored up?" Barth said at the same time.

  "Yes, ma'am. Like that."

  "And he was coked up and liquored up last night?" she pressed. "Yes, ma'am. I guess he was."

  "And you, do you guess you were?" Another silence, another search through the leaves and smoke, another disappointment. "Not coke. Not me and Sean."

  "Drunk, though."

  "Look, ma'am. I've got me a DUI-"

  "One?"

  "Maybe more than one. I can't get no more. They'll be fixin' to take my license then, and how'd me and Sean get to work?"

  "Tough break," Anna said unsympathetically. "You sure that's not why you ran?

  Because of the DUI and not because you were scared?"

  "No, ma'am. We was scared, too." The man who had been working with Jackie feeding trees into the chipper was sauntering toward them. Barth turned to stop him, but Anna said: "It's okay. We're nearly done here."

  "They bothering you, Jackie boy?" he asked. He slung one hip on the table and pinched the Marlboros from Jackie's shirt pocket, helping himself to one. He was a black man, probably in his fifties, strong and beautifully fit, his hair cropped close and grizzled at the temples.

  With the sweat and dirt and sawdust, both men were a uniform tannish-gray "Nah. They just come to see about Mama's car like I was telling you," Jackie replied. The older man punched Doolittle gently in the arm and tucked the smokes back into the younger man's pocket. It struck Anna that he'd been taking care of Jackie for a long time.

  "Jackie and his brother gotta have a car," he told Anna. "Their mama can't work; she's laid up. Their dad, he's been gone awhile."

  "I hear that," Anna said, warmed by his straightforwardness, but making no promises. To Jackie she said: "Mike Posey was making noises that he knew who murdered his sister. What can you tell me about that?" Jackie looked pained. He shot his buddy a glance that Anna couldn't fathom.

  Fear but what of or for whom was unclear. "Mike just talks.

  Likes to seem like he knows more'n he does," Jackie said.

  Anna was unconvinced and fixed him with an open, interested stare.

  Without words for cover, Jackie began to wiggle as if he wanted to hide his nakedness. The hum of the chipper, shut down but not shut off, wove around them like the drone of a summer day. "Mike doesn't know nothin'," Doolittle blurted. Again the look at his friend.

  The older man flicked his cigarette butt away and said to Anna: "Posey said he was gonna find the nigger that killed his sister." He filched another cigarette from Jackie's pocket. "What, Jackie?

  You don't think he talks that way when I'm around? He don't to my face because I could snap him like a dry stick. He's that kind that talks around the edges, making sure you hear him and pretending he's not talking to you at all. You and Sean steer clear of Posey, you hear me?"

  "I hear you," Jackie said. "Posey's not right in the head. Bad blood.

  His mama's been sick in her mind her whole life. He takes after her.

  Maybe it's not his fault. I don't know. But you get a rabid skunk in your yard, you don't go trying to make a pet out of it." Jackie Doolittle took the lecture with good grace. "I've got to get back to work," the man said. "You people finish up here."

  "Beau's foreman," Jackie explained. "I got to get back."

  "In a minute. Why does Mike Posey think his sister was murdered by an African-American?"

  "Because he thinks everything ugly is black and everything black is ugly. Like Beau said, He's not right in the head."

  "Think," Anna ordered. "He's drinking and talking. Did he say anything at all about it? The sheet his sister was draped in, KKK, anything?"

  "No. None of that. I think maybe he said something about his sister seeing somebody."

  "Somebody black?"

  "Maybe. It's just a thing I'm thinking. I don't remember him saying so right out." D riving back through the town of Port Gibson, Anna found herself looking for Sheriff Davidson's car with the interest of a schoolgirl dragging Main Street in hopes of accidentally meeting him.

  Cursing herself for a fool, she grabbed the first subject that came to mind. "The city too beautiful to burn?" she said aloud. "That's what the chamber of commerce says," Barth replied. Black Southerners didn't seem to have the interest in the Civil War their white brethren did. Perhaps the fantasies of who they were could not be so easily glamorized. "Then again maybe Grant didn't burn it because the town militia turned up its toes and cried uncle," Barth said. "There's histories and there's histories. Mrs. Posey's not the only crazy white person in the South.

  Round about then they had an alderman here got himself hung for killing his wife. He dressed her up as a Yankee soldier and ran a Yankee sword through her half a dozen times.

  "Same night he took a deer rifle to six slaves. Shot 'em and left 'em for dead on the garbage dump at the back end of this plantation he had.

  No law against that. He was hung for killing his wife."

  "Were they?" Anna asked. "Were they what?"

  "The slaves he left for dead, they all died?"

  "All but one, a kid no more than fifteen. He'd been shot twice in the head and twice through the belly. An old white lady who used to scavenge from the garbage dump found him and dragged him a mile and a quarter to her shack. Since his health was never good again and he didn't talk anymore, the alderman's heirs let her keep him."

  "White of them," Anna said and glimpsed a half-smile chipped out of a racial memory bitter as quinine. "That kind of stuff never makes it into the brochures," Barth said.

  Anna laughed. The South was growing on her. The extremes were more honest than the even veneer of trendy sanity that afflicted Northern and Western cities. To be human was to be melodramatic, to feel things acutely, love and hate and lust, to search for the Holy Grail, outrun the other kids in the fifty-yard dash and care mightily about it. "So.

  What do you think about the Posey girl being killed by a black man-assuming our killer's male," Anna asked. "It sounds real handy," Barth said curtly "But not impossible."

  "You know how many murders we had around here last year?" Barth asked.

  "Elehty-nine. Ei hty-eight of them were black on black. One was on black."

  "No black on white?"

  "Not one." Anna pondered that for a bit. Surely it had a deep sociological meaning, but whatever it w
as escaped her. "You don't think Danni was involved with a black boy?"

  "I didn't say that. It happens but not as often as you'd think. There's strong opposition from both sides.

  Mixed-race couples scare everybody. Everybody. What I'm saying is if Danni Posey was involved with a black boy it wouldn't've been him killed her. More likely that brother of hers would've killed her himself, seeing as how she'd tarnished the family name." Barth laughed but not without bitterness. Anna didn't hold it against him. She felt honored he was talking to her at all. Maybe experience taught Mississippians that outsiders not only did not understand the complex chemistry that made up their culture but drew their own conclusions to use for their own ends, usually at Mississippi's expense.

  Mike Posey might murder his sister if he'd found her with a black boy.