Deep South

by Nevada Barr

  An old alcoholic’s tale said that, when sneaked up on and surprised, the compact little animals would jump straight up, sometimes as much as four feet. Having nothing she’d rather do, Anna decided to see if it was true.

  Careful to stay directly behind the creature and to walk as quietly as she could—she’d never heard armadillos had keen hearing but this one had big ears and nature was usually a practical mother—she followed the animal in its single-minded grub seeking. Inch by inch she closed the gap between them. Her plan was simple, as befitted the gravity of the experiment and the fogged state of her intellect. When close enough, she would lunge, grab its tail, yell “Jump!” and see if it complied.

  There is no Zen like the Zen of the predator. The world narrowed to the scope of the hunt. By the time the armadillo had nosed and waddled around the bend in the road, Anna was less than thirty-six inches from the gray and scaly hindquarters. She’d geared herself for the leap into scientific discovery when a voice blasted into her consciousness.

  “Them’s not very good eatin’.”

  The world shifted and Anna found herself back in the big picture. Finally wised-up, her armadillo scuttled ahead, winning back the ten yards Anna had so cunningly eaten up. Disappointment turned to irritation in the time it took her to turn her head toward the interrupter, and irritation vanished in amazement in the blink of an eye.

  The man who had frightened away her beastie was a Confederate soldier: his crumpled gray cap looked as if it had seen more than one campaign, and his gray button-front trousers, worn and sweat-stained, were held up by suspenders, the trouser legs stuffed into battered black boots. The hallucination didn’t stop with the soldier. Behind him, two tents, old and made of canvas, were pitched around a central fire, where a couple more soldiers, sleeves rolled to greet the coming heat, a day’s growth of beard darkening their chins, drank coffee out of tin pannikins. One wore a saber at his belt. Three rifles, manufactured early in the nineteenth century but clean and oiled, leaned against an old wooden tucker box. Above the tents flew a Confederate flag, and a smaller flag, white with a red bar along one side, a blue canton with a white star and what looked like a magnolia tree.

  “Whoa,” Anna said.

  “You wanting a little breakfast?” the soldier asked politely. He drawled. Not the tobacco-juice sort of drawl Anna’d heard when Daddy and Baby talked, but a genteel, Rhett Butler kind of a drawl that was in keeping with the captain’s insignia on his cap.

  “No,” Anna managed. “I was ...” Suddenly her experiment seemed too hard to explain to an army man of any stripe. Or era. “I was just watching him. I wasn’t going to eat him.”

  The soldier looked at her long and hard. “You’re not from around here, are you, girl?”

  “Not really,” Anna admitted. Taco appeared from the woods to slobber on her thigh.

  “Hunter?”

  This time Anna was prepared. “Just an overgrown lap dog.”

  “Let us give you a cup of coffee?”

  Anna followed him into the Civil War and was treated to good coffee in a tin cup that burned her hands. Her costumed campers were re-enactors. She’d heard the term now and again but had never appreciated the scope or the enthusiasm with which the hobby was pursued. In fact the word “hobby” was met with polite outrage, as if she’d suggested to an Orthodox Jew that reading the Torah was a nice pastime.

  The soldier who had ended her game with the armadillo was Jimmy Williams, a tax lawyer with a firm in Jackson. The other two referred to him as Captain Williams or “Cap.” His lieutenants—this camp was conspicuously devoid of privates—were Ian McIntire, a Honda salesman from Pearl, and Leo Fullerton, a Baptist minister from Port Gibson.

  Captain Williams suited the role of a soldier: lean and strong-looking with thick brown hair just beginning to show a salting of age. Though Anna put him at around fifty, his youthful body, married to a face creased with the kind of wrinkles only the sun can scour into flesh, gave him an ageless look. The Honda salesman was a different story. Ian McIntire would look more at home in a suit, preferably seersucker, and a tie. Probably of an age with Jimmy Williams, he had hair that was white, cut short and bristling like hoarfrost in the morning sun. Joviality oozed from him. His belly was round, his face oval and fleshy, his eyes bright St. Nick blue and his smile boyish. When he laughed, and that was often, the laughter was high-pitched yet pleasant. The kind of laugh actors love; one so infectious others must laugh along with it.

  Reverend Leo Fullerton was the youngest, mid-thirties at a guess. Dark hair, low over deep-set eyes, and a wide mouth set above a long chin lent his face a crushed and cruel aspect. His left eye was crossed and it was hard to tell where he was looking. But for a bit of a paunch, he was a powerfully built man.

  A ludicrous assortment for Civil War soldiers, Anna thought. Then it came home to her that soldiers in every civil war were just merchants and boys, thieves and laborers, husbands and bankers.

  While Ian brought her a three-legged stool, the captain insisted she take a doughnut, fried that morning and liberally dusted with powdered sugar. Southern hospitality evidently was not a myth. The lieutenant reverend was the only member of the group who was standoffish, but it seemed due more to natural shyness than any malice.

  With the unselfconscious delight of boys, they told her the history of the Jeff Davis Avengers, a ragtag company of rebels formed in Port Gibson near the end of the war, when Grant was wringing the last drop of resistance from a besieged Vicksburg. Begrudgingly, they admitted there were no records of the Avengers ever doing battle, but to a man, they were absolutely convinced those long-dead civilian soldiers of Port Gibson had been instrumental in the war.

  “Covert Ops” popped into Anna’s head, but she knew she couldn’t say it with a straight face. Out of deference to this singular passion of her hosts, she kept her mouth shut.

  Each item in camp was lovingly described: the iron skillets, the cooking tripod, the rifles. The good reverend must have had the strongest curatorial instincts of the three. When conversation moved to artifacts that they, as re-enactors, were breathing new life into, he became animated. It was a mildly alarming transformation. His slash mouth, too wide for his teeth, giving them a spiky feral aspect, might have come across as excited in another man but had a manic feel when manifest by the preacher.

  “These things aren’t just old stuff, junk,” Leo said as he brought one of the rifles over to where Anna sat. “These are the actual weapons those boys carried. They were bought new by somebody’s daddy or uncle.” He pulled open the breach and looked to see if the rifle was loaded. “They were used for squirrel, deer, bear. Put food on the table. Then along comes the war and these boys stand to lose everything. I mean everything—not just a little blood and time like the North. A way of life, everything they stood for, believed, everything they owned. So out comes the squirrel gun and they go out knowing they’ll be shooting boys like themselves.”

  He was standing too close, towering. The rifle was at eye level to Anna, deadly wood and metal bulk held in the blunt hands of an excited stranger. Anna’s skull bones began to feel fragile. Evincing a sudden need to stretch, she stood and put some distance between herself and this son of the Confederacy.

  As Leo Fullerton had been revving up, Ian and Jimmy had been growing twitchy. A strained look passed between them, and Captain Williams tossed half a cup of coffee he’d just poured for himself into the campfire as if trying to interrupt the preacher’s flow. Maybe Fullerton was prone to psychotic breaks when faced with modern-day Yankees in his Civil War ideal. Anna’d heard somewhere that the South didn’t lock up the insane, but integrated them into the fabric of everyday society.

  “You’d think there’d be more pieces left,” Leo said. “But not pristine, not like this. This came with its own history. This was a Union soldier’s weapon till I got it. A fella from Connecticut fought right here. Right here,” he reiterated.

  Williams had begun shifting his weight from foot to
foot, like a man who wanted to pace, to stalk, but wasn’t letting himself. Trained to watch hands when uncomfortable with her fellow men, Anna noted his fingers were flicking occasionally: aborted movements, as if he restrained himself from reaching out to grab somebody.

  Reverend Fullerton aimed the rifle at an imaginary foe, and the captain laughed, loud and hollow, the stage laugh of a bad actor.

  “Easy there, Leo. The lady doesn’t want to watch you win back the South.” Williams stepped around the campfire and clapped Fullerton on the back with a little too much force for mere conviviality.

  “Are you interested in history?” Leo Fullerton asked Anna in the manner that lets one know a reply in the negative will be construed as proof of idiocy.

  She was saved from answering by Ian. “What brings you to these parts?” He forced a change of subject. “Down for the pilgrimage?”

  Other than Mecca, Anna wasn’t aware of much in the pilgrim line. “I’m the new district ranger on this part of the Trace,” she told them. Abruptly the weather changed, a cold wind blew down from the northward of their opinion. Like comic thieves caught suddenly when the lights are switched on, the three of them froze in tableau.

  Anna got a whole lot wearier. “Taco,” she hollered and the dog rose obligingly from where he’d flopped in front of one of the tents. “I’d better get to my unpacking. Thanks for the coffee.”

  The psychic equivalent of a nudge passed through the faux soldiers, and they came back to life. Anna departed in a flurry of “Sure you won’t have another cuppa,” “A lady ranger, huh?” and “Welcome to Mississippi.” The tone was too cheery, covering up for bad manners. Or something else she was totally in the dark about.

  She took the shortest route back to the road between two Dodge Ram pickup trucks. Plastered on the bumper of one of them was the familiar shape of the rebel flag. Across it was written: HERITAGE, NOT HATE.

  As she and Taco walked across the apron of well-worn grass to the asphalt road, a small utility vehicle, a sort of glorified golf cart with the forest-green stripe of the National Park Service on its side, puttered around the bend.

  “Frank, meet your new boss,” Ian McIntire hollered, and trotted down the gentle incline to wave the machine and its pilot over. Normalcy had returned. The Civil War re-enactors were again at ease. Anna didn’t know if they’d quickly acclimatized to the appalling phenomenon of a female district ranger or, and this grated on her overtaxed nerves, decided a lady cop was bound to be sufficiently inept that whatever had struck them dumb at the mention of her avocation was considered safe once again.

  A wiry man pushing sixty, Frank had thick red hair devoid of so much as a spattering of gray. He climbed out of the car wearing the familiar relaxed green and gray of an NPS maintenance uniform. The inside of both arms from elbow to wrist were crosshatched with deep scars, as if he’d held onto a bobcat who did not wish to be held onto.

  Anna introduced herself, and Frank shook hands gingerly.

  “So you’re it,” he said as he pulled off his green ball cap and mopped sweat from his face and neck with a wad of paper towels he’d stashed in his hip pocket. “You sure got your work cut out for you. I’m not saying anything against anybody, but there hasn’t been a whole heck of a lot done around here for a month of Sundays.”

  “You look like you’re working hard,” Anna said politely.

  “Yeah, well, I ain’t law enforcement,” Frank countered. The rift that often existed between the two disciplines was evidently fairly pronounced on the Trace. “All I can tell you is I been trying to raise Randy and Barth for the past ten minutes. Either they got their radios off or they’re playin’ possum somewhere.”

  “What’s the problem?” Anna asked because she had to. Being “the boss” put her in a double bind. As law enforcement, one didn’t have the luxury of letting things slide, of looking the other way and letting someone else handle whatever it was needed handling. Now, as a supervisor, she had the added onus of being obliged to look as if she actually cared.

  “Dispatch’s had half a dozen calls about an obstruction on the road just this side of Big Bayou Pierre. Sounds like somebody’s cows got loose. Nowadays everybody and his dog’s got a cellular phone and is dialing 1-800-PARK every time a picnicker breaks a fingernail or somebody gets a flat tire. They don’t stop and help like they used to, they just poke them phone buttons and keep right on driving, feeling as pleased as punch thinking they done the Christian thing.”

  “I’ll check it out,” Anna said, not sorry to have something to do since sleeping or moving boxes seemed beyond her capabilities.

  Frank headed back to his cart. Anna turned the other way, choosing the short side of the loop for the walk back to her quarters. “Frank,” she called after she’d gone half a dozen steps.

  “Yeah?”

  “What’s my number?”

  “Five-eighty.”

  “What’s dispatch?”

  “Seven hundred.”

  Every park Anna had worked in had the same radio call number system. One hundred was the superintendent. Rangers were in the five hundreds. The numbers went by position, not personality. But after spending a surreal hour in the nineteenth century, she’d felt the need to check lest Mississippi did things differently from the rest of the world.

  Fifteen minutes’ digging through cartons freed up her uniform if not her hat. Leather gear, cuffs, badges, service weapon—the symbols of office—were provided by the park where one worked. Anna’d not yet been issued hers. Like most long-term employees, she managed to buy, borrow, and acquire through sins of omission her own gun belt, holster, Kevlar vest and handcuffs. Never had she had the cojones—or the stupidity—to accidentally-on-purpose retain a government-issue Sig-Sauer nine-millimeter handgun.

  Enjoying a touch of the good old days before the NPS moved to semi-automatic weapons, she snapped her faithful .357 Colt into the holster.

  Before departing to herd illegal bovines, she shut Taco in the back room with Piedmont. Not because Taco required incarceration, but because, to her surprise, Piedmont had taken a genuine if sarcastic liking to the big lab, and Anna knew it would comfort him to have his friend around to abuse during this time of trial.

  Energized by the simple expedient of strapping on her gun—though strapping was no longer involved, it was all done with Velcro—Anna took possession of her new patrol car. It was clean and not more than a year old, a powerful Crown Victoria with a unit on the dash that flashed blue lights: an innovation that served several purposes. More compact than the traditional light bar, it wouldn’t get damaged by low-flying birds and branches and, since it changed the expected police car profile, it made catching speeders easier. The only thing the car lacked was a cage. Mentally, Anna put installing one at the top of her list of things to do. She had no desire to have those she arrested sitting behind her with nothing between her scrawny neck and their hands but goodwill.

  “Seven hundred, five-eight-zero, ten-seven,” she called in service.

  “Ten-four,” a female voice returned from the dispatcher’s office in Tupelo and: “Welcome to the Natchez Trace.”

  “Thanks,” Anna said and cut to the heart of the matter. “Could you tell me where Big Bayou Pierre is located?” She’d forgotten to ask Frank for directions.

  “Turn right and drive.”

  Getting lost was hard on a north-south road. If Anna stayed too long in Mississippi, her orienteering skills were bound to atrophy.

  Until an automobile struck a cow and a litigious citizen filed a lawsuit, animals on the road did not constitute an emergency. Anna drove the specified fifty miles per hour, windows rolled down. Green and blooming, the Trace meandered through woods and open glades. Where red clover did not lay its carpets of crimson, the sides of the road were neatly mowed to tree line. At mile marker forty-nine the landscape opened into fields: a pasture with horses grazing, a cedar barn weathered to natural gray velvet and, behind it, the unnatural round hill of an Indian mound. This s
ection of the Trace was known as the Valley of the Moon. Anna savored the romance of the words and the world.

  More tree-canopied miles of dappled green and sun yellow, then the view opened out again and Anna saw a cluster of cars stopped in the road.

  Three in the southbound lane, half a dozen scattered in the northbound, jockeying out from one another as drivers maneuvered for a look at the problem. A handful had done the unthinkable by actually getting out of their vehicles. A truck, once red, now rust, had tried to circumnavigate the obstruction and slid down the bank, where it remained, mired in the mud twenty feet above the bank of Big Bayou Pierre.

  What was missing was any sign of livestock. Closer, and Anna saw what had caused the traffic tie-up. A log, maybe ten feet long and a foot or two in diameter, lay across the center line blocking both lanes. A small group of men stood around staring at it, waiting, no doubt, for the ranger to come move it. No trees grew nearby. The log must have rolled off somebody’s trailer.

  Turning on her flashers in the faint hope it would keep the next car along from rear-ending her and knocking the collected automobiles into the bayou like so many dominoes, Anna pulled to the side of the road behind the last car in the line.

  Out of her patrol car, walking toward the clot of people standing well back from the log, she called: “Go ahead and drag it off.”

  There was a moment of stunned silence, then a man in a suit and tie, who looked as if he’d spent most of his adult life eating fried food, laughed and shouted: “We’re waiting for you to drag it off.”

  This annoying sally was met with a gust of laughter that Anna didn’t understand till the impromptu crowd parted. The obstruction was not a log but, indeed, livestock of a sort. Blocking the narrow road was the biggest alligator Anna had seen outside a PBS special.