Deep South

by Nevada Barr

  “Lady, you look to be in a whole heap of hurt.” The voice was thick, its owner talking around a wad of chewing tobacco the size of a golf ball. Anna blinked, waiting to see if her leg was being pulled or if he really talked that way.

  “A whole heap of hurt,” he repeated.

  “Looks like it,” she said. Taco wandered back to resume guard dog duties. He leaned against her muddy thigh, beating a canine welcome on the bumper with his tail.

  “Hunter?” the moon-pie face asked.

  “Tourist,” Anna said, too tired to explain about jobs and transfers.

  The man’s pale face split into a laugh, and Anna saw, or thought she saw, streaks of tobacco juice on his teeth. Her old Colt .357 wheel gun was in the glove box. The thought comforted her as she edged in that direction.

  “What did she say, Baby?” a creaking voice cut through the one-sided hilarity.

  “Tourist.”

  Ancient laughter crackled from the window, leaking around the man Anna could see.

  “Not you,” the driver managed, merriment abated. “Your dog. He a huntin’ dog?”

  “Tourist,” Anna said again.

  “What, Baby?”

  “Tourist dog, Daddy.” Much laughter. Anna found herself inclined to join in but was afraid it would turn to hysteria.

  “Get on with it, Baby. I got work to do,” came a querulous creaking from the invisible passenger.

  The round face sobered, the wad of chaw was more securely stowed in the cheek and “Baby” got down to business. “Daddy wants to know if y’all need a hand.”

  By way of reply, Anna shined her failing light on the locust clutching her trailer. The verdant embrace struck her funny bone, comedy of the absurd, and she laughed. “You wouldn’t happen to have a chainsaw on you, would you?”

  Baby looked at her as if she was a half-wit, then said to the darkness beyond his shoulder: “Lady needs a chainsaw, Daddy.”

  Anna heard the unhappy notes of bent metal being forced as the passenger door of the truck opened and closed. Taco whined and wagged. Rummaging noises emanated from the pickup bed, then an old man—somewhere between sixty and biblical—came around the end of the truck, red brake lights lending his shrunken cheeks and spindly silhouette a devilish cast. In his left hand was a chainsaw with a twenty-four-inch blade.

  “Whatcher need cut? That tree you backed on into?”

  Anna was torn between efficiency and dignity. Efficiency lost. “I didn’t back into it,” she defended herself. “I slid ever so gently into the muck and, bingo, a tree was on me.” Pretty lame, but it was the best she could do.

  Daddy nodded. “Loess,” he said, leaving her no wiser. “Melts like sugar. Back the truck up, Baby. You’re just an accident waitin’ to happen. Back on up now,” he admonished sharply as the younger man started to pull ahead. “Git those headlights on the job. You know that.”

  Gears grated, meshed, and the truck lumbered back till the headlights threw the old man, the trailer and the tree into garish relief. Anna shaded her eyes from the glare and watched as, one-handed, Daddy drop-started the chainsaw and began cutting away the locust, smaller branches first. Baby, out of the truck so Anna could see the full effect, wore overalls over a plaid shirt and heavy boots. As his father cut, he swamped, hauling away the branches, some as big around as Anna’s leg. Early on she offered to help but was warned she’d get herself “all over poison ivy” and so desisted. Pride was one thing, poison ivy quite another. She’d had it once and counted herself among the sadder but wiser girls.

  The tree was quickly disposed of. A chain, appearing from the same rubble of necessities that had camouflaged the chainsaw, was hooked around the Rambler’s bumper, and fifteen minutes start to finish, Baby and Daddy had Anna back on the road. Sensing an offer of money would be offensive, she thanked them by volunteering information about herself, an intellectual breaking of bread to indicate trust and a willingness to share as they had shared their time and strength with her.

  “I got a job on the Natchez Trace,” she told them after giving her name. “I’m working for the Park Service there in Port Gibson.” She was careful not to mention she was in law enforcement. Either it made people feel as if they had to take a stand on the gender issue or it inspired them to relate every story they’d ever heard where a cop had done somebody dirt. Still, Baby and Daddy looked blank.

  “The Trace there by Port Gibson?” Daddy said at last. The old man leaned on the front of the pickup, the single working headlight shining past his scrawny red-cotton-covered chest in a rural depiction of the sacred heart painting that hung in the hall of Mercy High, where Anna had attended boarding school. “Then what’re you doing in these parts beside getting yourself stuck?”

  It was Anna’s turn to look blank. “Going to the Natchez Trace?” she asked hopefully.

  “Nope,” Daddy said.

  “You’re going nowhere,” Baby added helpfully.

  “That’s pretty much it,” Daddy confirmed.

  “One of the rangers I talked to on the phone said this was a shortcut.”

  Daddy and Baby found that inordinately amusing. Gratitude was fading, but Anna hadn’t the energy to replace it with anything but pathos so she maintained her good cheer. At least outwardly.

  “What you want is Highway 27 out of Vicksburg,” Baby told her, and aimed a stream of tobacco juice politely the other way. “Where you’re at starts out as Old Black Road and ends up as nothing down on the river. It’s where me and Daddy goes fishing. All’s down there is moccasins and mosquitoes.”

  “I must have read the directions wrong,” Anna said.

  “Way wrong. Those old boys was having a joke and you were it,” Daddy said succinctly. “You go on a couple miles’n you’ll see a place to turn around. Then you go back the way you come twenty miles or so. You’ll find 27. If you hit the interstate, you gone too far.”

  Anna thanked them again. They waited. She waited. Then she realized they weren’t leaving till they saw her safe in her car and on her way. Having loaded Taco, she climbed in the Rambler and pulled back into the twisted night.

  Daddy was right. She’d not misread the directions; she’d followed them to the letter. One of her rangers wasn’t anxious to see her arrive: Randy Thigpen, a GS-9 field ranger she’d be supervising. Anna wished she could dredge up some surprise at the petty betrayal, but she was too old and too cynical. Nobody involved in the hiring process had come right out and said anything, and in these days of rampant litigation and gender skirmishes, they wouldn’t dare. But she’d heard the subtext in the pauses. There’d never been a female law enforcement ranger on the far southern end of the Trace, and there’d never been a female district ranger in any of the nine districts and four hundred fifty—odd miles of the parkway. It had been unofficially deemed too conservative, too old-fashioned for such an alarming development. From the gossip she’d picked up, she was hired because she was known to have an “edge.” She was an experiment. They would find if she was to be a cat among the pigeons or the other way around. The “old-fashioned” people, Anna had thought, would be the park visitors. Randy Thigpen evidently wanted to carry the experiment into the office.

  Jump off that bridge when you come to it, she told herself.

  When she finally found her way onto the Trace, the sun was rising and, with it, her spirits. The vague picture she’d formed in her mind of a bleak and dusty place, overfarmed by sharecroppers, dotted with shacks and broken-down vehicles, was shattered in a rainbow brilliance of flowers. “Wake up, Taco,” she said, nudging the beast with her knee. “Hang your head out the window or something useful. The place looks like it’s been decorated for a wedding.”

  The Natchez Trace Parkway, a two-lane road slated, when finished, to run from Nashville, Tennessee, to Natchez, Mississippi, had been the brainchild of the Ladies’ Garden Clubs in the South. Besides preserving a unique part of the nation’s past, the federal government had believed, building the Trace would pump money, jobs and a p
aved road into what was then a depressed area. Unlike other scenic parkways, such as the Blue Ridge in Tennessee or the John D. Rockefeller Jr. National Parkway in Wyoming, the Trace would not be based on spectacular scenery but would conserve the natural and agricultural history of Mississippi. It would follow and, where possible, preserve the original trail made through the swamps and forest by Kentucks, entrepreneurs out of what would become Kentucky, walking back home after rafting goods down the Mississippi to be sold at the port in Natchez, and by the outlaws who preyed upon them, by Indians trading and warring and finally by soldiers of the Union Army bent on bringing the South to heel.

  This morning no ghost of the violence remained. Mile after mile, the road dipped and turned gracefully through rich fields, grassy meadows, shoulders bright in red clover, daffodils, pink joe-pye weed and a water-blue flower Anna didn’t recognize. Dogwood blossoms winked through the spring woods. Purple wisteria, vines covering trees fifty feet high, draped to the ground. Red bud trees added crimson patches. Carolina jasmine, yellow falls of blooms, draped over fences and downed timber. And there was no traffic. Not a single car coming or going. The dreamlike quality of the frog-song-filled night was carrying over into the light of day.

  After twelve miles of garden beauty, the road widened briefly into four lanes and Anna saw the sign for Rocky Springs Campground.

  “We’re home,” she told the animals. The words sounded mocking, though she’d not meant them that way. Mississippi was about as far from home as Anna had ever been, if not in miles, then in mind.

  ★ 2 ★

  Anna had no trouble finding her house. Randy Thigpen hadn’t been the only one to give directions. Those of the Chief Ranger John Brown Brown, based in Tupelo, Mississippi, one hundred sixty miles north of Anna’s district, had provided her with a more accurate map: first left after the campground entrance, first house on the right. To Anna’s tired mind, it sounded not unlike the directions to Never-Never Land.

  As promised, on the right was the park employee housing, two identical brick structures. Long and low, built in the sixties with windowed fronts, they resembled dwarf school buildings with carports on one end. In the carport of house number one was a white patrol vehicle sporting a green stripe. According to John B. Brown, the keys to the car, the house and the ranger station would be atop the left front tire. Rangers the country over were so trusting it was touching. Anna hoped that would never change. That the members of the law enforcement agency boasting the highest average level of education also retained the highest level of faith in their fellows was an indication that things were not as bad as the media would like people to believe.

  Anna parked, emancipated Taco, muttered unheeded promises of succor to the ever-shrieking Piedmont and went to retrieve the keys to her new kingdom.

  Wooden beams, painted barn red, cramped the low-roofed carport. Every joist, junction, every crevice where wall met upright or upright met roof, was festooned in ragged gray-white. Spiderwebs, an immodest, immoderate, unseemly number of spiderwebs. Keeping her hands and arms close to her sides lest she inadvertently brush one of her neighbors onto her person, Anna peered into the web-fogged shadows. Seven of the nearer webs held visible arachnids. One of these was the size of a half dollar, bigger if one looked with the imagination and not the eyes. Anna had come to terms with tarantulas of the Southwest. She’d made every effort to refrain from annoying them. In turn, they stayed sedately on the ground. They did not drape one’s comers and drop down one’s collar.

  Soon, in this carport, there would be serious harassing of wildlife. Having looked carefully before thrusting her hand into the dark, she snatched the keys off the tire and fled back to the sunshine.

  She was of two minds about the house. Compared with her tower in Mesa Verde, it was completely lacking in charm. Compared with much of the Park Service housing she’d inhabited, it was palatial. The floors were hardwood, the walls white. There was a bath and a half that appeared clean and serviceable, and three small bedrooms, only two of which she was allowed to use. Exhibiting true governmental logic, the NPS was willing to rent her the house at the slightly lower monthly rate of a two-bedroom if she promised she wouldn’t use bedroom number three. “Not even for storage?” she’d asked. Not even for storage.

  Those not employed by the parks might well ask: “Who would know?” Those with the Park Service for any length of time knew everybody knew everything all the time. Information traveled by gossip, innuendo and osmosis. Probably employees in the Port Gibson District—if not everybody from Natchez to Nashville—already knew more about her than a shrink or a priest would discover in a lifetime of revelations.

  The kitchen was small, with white counters and a linoleum floor. Over the sink was a view of her backyard, a weedy mowed area divided by a broken clothesline and hemmed in on two sides by an apparently impenetrable wall of trees. Not the tidy spaced trees of the water-poor Four Corners area, forests where one could stroll and contemplate the serenity of nature, but a tangled, creeping wall of life. Trees tied to vines laced with Spanish moss formed a curtain of green that dropped to the ground. There shrubs took over. Her backyard looked not so much planted as carved from the forest and mightily defended by repeated mowing. Just such country had the original Trace been cut through with no tools but those a man could carry on his back.

  Had Anna been rested, she might have been more appreciative of the feat. As it was, she just wondered why they hadn’t stayed home.

  On the counter by the refrigerator was a five-gallon plastic container of store-bought water with a Post-it note on it. She plucked the note off and held it to the light. Somewhere between forty-three and forty-five her eyesight had changed. That, or small print had grown insidiously smaller. “The water here won’t kill you but that’s all the good I can say of it. Welcome to the Trace. Steve Stilwell, DR, Ridgeland.”

  Stilwell. Anna remembered one of the many new names thrust upon her over the telephone during the past month. Stilwell was the district ranger in Ridgeland, the section of the Natchez Trace north of Jackson, about forty-five miles from Rocky Springs. He’d been doing double duty, his district and hers, till she came on board. Steve Stilwell, she was prepared to like. She had spent too many years in the desert not to feel kindly toward a man offering water.

  A flicker of movement caught her eye, and she wandered into the dining area, the short leg of the L-shaped living room. On the wall near the windows overlooking the backyard were two shockingly green lizards, each about four inches long. For a moment she watched them doing push-ups as they gauged the distance between themselves and this intruder.

  “If you eat spiders, I’ll ask Piedmont to let you live,” she told them. Saying the cat’s name reminded her of her responsibilities.

  Having rescued the orange tiger cat from the Rambler, she established him, a litter box, food and water in one of the back bedrooms, opened the door of his carrier and shut the door to the hall to let him acclimatize to one small piece of real estate at a time.

  Back in the living room, she realized she had no idea where she was headed. The U-Haul had her goods locked up and, at the moment, she hadn’t the energy for moving heavy objects. Food would help but she had none and no clear idea of where to get any. It was too early to call anybody and ask questions, too late to go to bed.

  Taco bounded into the house, mud on his jaws where he’d tried to enjoy a little Mississippi cuisine. Anna decided to walk the dog. A tedious task but one that always made her feel appreciated. With Taco carefully leashed—she didn’t want to be seen breaking the rules her first day on the job—she walked down the short spur where park housing was located. The day was already warm and promising to get warmer. Soft, damp air swaddled and embraced. She missed the light, indifferent caresses of the mountain breezes. To her right was the Trace. Just off of it, introducing the campground area, was a small brick building with public toilets and, she had been told, a tiny office for the Rocky Springs ranger. Because of budget cuts, two of
the ranger positions in the Port Gibson District would go unfilled. The Rocky Springs office would stand empty. Anna’s office at District Headquarters was twenty miles south in Port Gibson. Taco pulled left toward where the road forked. The campground was to her right. What lay straight ahead, she had no idea.

  Too tired for adventures, she chose the known and allowed Taco to drag her toward the campground. Rocky Springs camp was laid out in a loop. A narrow asphalt road circled a wooded area several acres in size. Camps, cleared areas with grills and picnic tables, were located on both sides of the road. Two brick buildings housing toilets sufficed for the amenities. Though it was a medium-sized campground by NPS standards, the crush of trees made it seem intimate.

  Incognito in civilian clothes, with Taco for cover, she wandered unimpeded past several RVs and a small silver Airstream with Michigan plates. Campers were quiet at this hour, sleeping or standing dully over wood fires, coffee cups clasped reverently to their bosoms. Birds, none of which Anna could see in the dense canopy of leaves, discussed the situation in hushed warblings.

  Feeling mildly rebellious, she let Taco off his leash. The retriever loped off to a deserted campsite and stuck his nose into something she was sure she didn’t want to know about. Enjoying not being in an automobile and not traveling any faster than the gods intended, she continued on without him.

  Near the top of the loop, where the road curved to the left out of sight, a strange phenomenon brought her out of the meditative state. In the shallow ditch between the asphalt and the inner circle of camps, a stone the size of a large cantaloupe was moving, bobbing as if it rode atop bubbling waters.

  Thinking again about the need to get her eyes examined, she left the road for the mowed grass on the shoulder. After she had walked a yard or two, the rock resolved itself into a more logical form. An armadillo was rooting through the grass in search of its breakfast. No stranger to these marvelous beasts, Anna had seen them in the Guadalupe Mountains, where she’d been a ranger once upon a time. On the Trans Pecos, they were fondly referred to as “Texas speed bumps.” There was even a joke made for them: Why did the chicken cross the road? To show the armadillo it could be done. The animals were slow, nearsighted and not terribly bright. The armor they’d evolved to defend themselves was no match for speeding automobiles. This was the first one Anna could remember seeing alive.