Nevada Barr - Anna Pigeon 05 - Endangered Species

by Endangered Species(lit)

  The others approached. Schlessinger fired up her four-wheeler and gutted the nightwith the noise of her departure.

  Anna sighed and clicked off the light. Evidently Marty wasn't going to eat so much as a tick tonight. She shrugged in the darkness.

  It was always good to have something to look forward to.

  GUY MARSHALL a man in his late forties with a chiseled face, no hair to speak Of, and the body of a rodeo cowboy-lean and strong and stove up in one knee-walked in from the beach. The moon reflected off his pate, casting a deep shadow over his eyes.

  Anna and the rest of the crew had dressed for the occasion in light- weight clothing and tennis shoes. Marshall wore regulation firefighting regalia: lemon-yellow shirt, olive drab pants of fireretardant NoMex, and heavy lug-soled, lace-up, leather boots. He'd been wearing them for so many years he'probably thought they were comfortable.

  Marshall was crew boss in charge of the abbreviated presuppression crew: Anna and three men, one from Gulf Islands, one from Cape Hatteras, and one from the Natchez Trace Parkway. Fire crews were drawn from a well of red-carded rangers-those with the training who could also pass the physical. The call went out to the national parks. District rangers let go whoever they could best spare-or whoever had a favor coming or whined the loudest. Fire details, especially one as cushy as presuppression on Cumberland Island, were much sought after. Twenty-one twelve-hour days with time and a half for overtime plus per them rounded out one's paycheck nicely.

  The crew boss threw one leg across the seat of the ATV he'd claimed for his own and shot a thin stream of tobacco juice into the sand. In the moonlight it looked like an ink blot on white paper.

  A seal balancing a ball on its nose, Anna thought, looking at the impromptu Rorschach. She made a mental note to ask her sister when next she called what sort of incipient madness that might indicate.

  Laughter waited up from the beach; the throaty laugh of the interpretive ranger who lived on the island, echoed by the barklike guffaw of a member of fire crew and the booming hoot that had so incensed Marty Schlessinger.

  "They're all crazier'n bedbugs," Guy said without rancor, and ejected another stream of tobacco juice neatly over the handlebars.

  "Watching a bunch of turtles bury eggs has got 'em all lit up like the Fourth of July. I'd hate to see 'em in a hen yard. They'd think they died and went to heaven. Takes all kinds, I guess. Look at museum curators. The Park Service's got a whole passel of 'em. What do they do? Sit around and watch old shit get older."

  "We could have stayed back at the dorm and watched Under Siege Two," Anna reminded him. On the island there were only two available videos, Under Siege II and Fire Weather: A Meteorologist's View.

  "Like I always say, turtles is damn good entertainment," Guy drawled.

  What was left of Marshall's hair was steel-gray and cropped close in a horseshoe that extended from car to car just above his collar. He pulled a comb from his hip pocket and carefully ran it through the back and sides." Reliving my glory days," he said when he caught Anna watching.

  For a minute or two they waited without speaking as the others made their way across the dunes. Flashlights had been summarily banned by Schlessinger. Light disoriented the turtles-not only when they came ashore to nest but when the babies hatched. Theory had it that when turtles as a species were young, man had not yet discovered fire, let alone electricity. Temperature dictated that the hatchlings emerge from their sand incubators at night. Instinct told them to creep toward the lights on the horizon, the stars over the sea that would be home.

  With electric lights and beach front condos, baby turtles were often confused, crawling inland toward the false stars and dying.

  At present the moon made flashlights unnecessary and Anna reveled in the gentle southern night. Ten p.m. and it was still over eighty degrees. Even with the drought, the air was humid. Anna's hair curled and her fingernails grew. After so long in the high desert of southern Colorado's Mesa Verde National Park, she felt like a raisin turning back into a grape.

  Near the ocean there was always a slight breeze-enough to cool the sweat and make the air feel alive. Overhead it played through the tinder-dry leaves of the live oaks, producing a delicate clatter, a sweet counterpoint to the throbbing shush of waves against the shore.

  The open space between the tree line and the sea suited Anna.

  As in the wide country of the Southwest, the eye could roll out to the distance, the soul expand into the great spaces. Back in the densc woods she didn't breathe as easily. There the air scarcely moved and the clatter was like as not ticks dropping from the vegetation in search of new homes with better-stocked larders.

  Like the hero in a drawing room comedy, Dijon Smith entered laughing." oooeee, I wish I had balls the size of a ghost crab's," he said." Those little suckers aren't afraid of anything." Anna knew what he meant. The little crustaceans, the biggest not more than ten inches from claw to claw, would stand on their back legs and challenge the ton-and-a-half pumper trucks as they drove down the beach.

  Dijon's dark skin soaked up the moonlight till he looked a shadow of himself. In a clichd Anna would never give voice to, all she could see were the whites of his eyes and his flashing teeth.

  At twenty-two, Dijon was the baby of the bunch by nearly ten years and complained good-naturedly about being stuck in the retirement home for aging firefighters. Under the spreading branches of a live oak, Smith jumped up, caught hold of a limb, and began chinning himself with an irritating effortlessness.

  " That's knocking ticks down on you," Guy warned.

  "Shit! No lie?" Dijon dropped and began brushing off his shoulders and arms." Don't tell me that, man. I hate those little mother-" A glance at Anna." Buggers.

  "They can sense your body heat like heat-seeking missiles," the crew boss said." You shake their tree and they drop on you."

  "Ticks." Dijon shuddered and did a little dance designed either to dislodge insects or get a laugh. With Dijon Smith it was hard to tell. Bending over at the waist, he fluttered his fingers through his close- cropped hair.

  "Don't flick them on me," Anna griped, and jumped back. So convincing was the performance, she half believed he was acrawl with bloodsucking monsters.

  Marshall slumped back on the ATV, feet over the handlebars, back against his day pack. Guy could get comfortable anywhere; a highly desirable attribute in a wildland firefighter." Get your eggs all laid?" he asked.

  " haven't gotten anything laid since we came to Cumbersome isle," Dijon returned." Even those turtles are starting to look good.

  I've got to get out of here. I need sex and pizza. This sand and surf and tick shit is driving me out of my"-again the look at Anna-"frigging mind."

  Anna smiled in the dark. Misplaced as it was, she appreciated the sentiment and cleaned up her language around Smith to keep her credit good.

  AI Magnus, Rick Spencer, Mitch Hanson, and Lynette Wagner washed up from the beach on a gust of chatter. Headlights and engine noise sliced the night as Anna buckled herself onto the bench seat of the pumper truck. Hanson had driven his government vehicle; Lynette rode with Dijon and Rick in a second truck as decrepit as the one Anna shared with AI.

  Magnus was a short stocky man somewhere in his thirties but exuding the ageless maturity of the devoted family man. While the A'fV and the truck growled into the night, AI scraped out the bowl of his pipe, then banged it against the side of the truck. The smell of sea air and stale tobacco radiated from his clothing and the cab began to feel as homey as a country living room.

  "No sense eating dust," he explained. He tamped fresh tobacco in the bowl.

  "Who's that Mitch Hanson guy?" Anna asked in idle curiosity.

  "Marty seemed deeply aggrieved that he not only had the temerity to exist but the unmitigated gall to do it in her vicinity."

  AI finished the tamping and went through the lengthy ritual of lighting his pipe before he answered. An addiction to pipe tobacco gave the user an unearned air of deep and co
nsidered wisdom.

  When the pipe was drawing properly, he said: "Mitch isn't a bad sort. He's a dozer operator with maintenance. Keeps the roads passable. An over-the-hill party boy. Double dipper. He's pretty much retired twice but's still on the payroll. Maybe that's what's getting to Marty."

  Anna nodded in the dark. Scattered throughout government services were retired military men pulling a full pension and a salary.

  Those who worked inspired jealousy. Those who coasted, hatred and contempt.

  Evidently Hanson was in the latter category. Anna had seen him grading the inland lanes. Or, now that she thought about it, she'd seen his bulldozer. Either he was nowhere around or he was lounging in the shade gossiping with the locals. He looked to be fifty or thereabout. His belly confirmed the aging-party-animal motif; thirty extra pounds rounded out his face and middle.

  The sight and sounds of the other vehicles faded. AI turned the key and fired up the engine. Inland the lanes were narrow, the palmetto close and thick. Stiff fingers of vegetation skritched along the sides of the truck. Despite the muggy heat, Anna rolled her window up. Without light she couldn't defend herself against the whip of the fronds.

  The road was washboarded and hosted deep ruts where streams carried rainfall from the interior. These seeming obstacles had no effect on Magnus and he roared along at a bone-rattling thirty miles per hour. In the beams of the headlights the lane unfurled, a twisting white ribbon through a tunnel of green. It put Anna in mind of Mr. Toad's Wild Ride in Disneyland. She cinched her seat belt as tight as it would go and braced both feet against the dashboard.

  "How'd you make out with Marty Schlessinger?" AI bawled over the racket of the truck." Did she ask you to dinner?"

  "Nope. I asked her over but she wasn't in the mood to go slumming."

  "Too bad. jimmy gave me a list of questions I'm supposed to ask her." jimmy was Ai's eight-year-old son. They talked almost every night. In a small office building about a mile from the dorm was a telephone fire crew had access to. Anna and AI were the only members who seemed to have anyone to call. Most evenings they flipped a coin to see who went first.

  Among Park Service nomads there were two mind-sets: those who threw themselves wholeheartedly into each new adventure, sleeping with whoever presented, eating what was set before them, and drinking deep from each intoxicating cup they came across; and those with a strong tether to home-a cord more often than not made of telephone wire. Age was a dividing factor-the young were liberal, having as yet acquired nothing worth conserving-but the newly single and dedicated bachelors swelled those ranks.

  The clatter of rusting metal drowned out even Al's basso profundo and Anna settled into a favorite pastime: watching the world go by. Spotlit into unnaturally bright colors, the jungle flickered past in patterns of green and black. This was a dry jungle with fragile grip on land. Soil was thin and sandy, the island prey to hurricanes that could flatten it or divide it in two with a sudden waterway. Plants grew with the voracious disregard of the condemned, springing from the rough ground in impenetrable thickets to fight for light and air beneath oaks broad-shouldered enough to have weathered a century of storms.

  Occasionally the glancing blow of the high beams would stun a night creature. Two baby raccoons, postcard-perfect, hung halfway up a palm tree. AI passed in a thunderous cloud of dust without ever seeing them. Anna hoped the quake of their passage wouldn't dislodge the kits. A sow and three piglets dashed for cover beneath the palmetto fronds. Three deer grazed in a meadow in the center of the island where a Beechcraft on loan for drug interdiction was tied down at the end of a dirt strip.

  'There wei-e few meadows maintained on the island. This was one of the largest. Even more than in daylight, Anna felt the relief of coming out into the open after so long a time closed beneath the dusty canopy of vegetation.

  Moonlight turned the deer to shadows, the dry grass to textured marble. Unlike the feral pigs, deer on Cumberland were not hunted.

  These looked up as the truck ground past but didn't leave off chewing.

  Beside the meadow, tucked behind a cottage that could have lured Hansel and Gretel to their deaths, was Stafford, one of the derelict mansions. Built by Andrew Carnegie for his daughter, it had been a place of carriages and candlelight and southern hospitality.

  This fine old house, like a dowager duchess fallen on evil times, now fought just to keep body and soul together.

  Within were wooden staircases, sconces, parquet floors, coffered ceilings-crafunen's work that, if artisans could still be found, would cost a fortune to replicate. All was threatened by time and mildew. The Park Service scrambled for funds to battle the decay and drafted plans to bring back the grandeur, but for now it sat empty and vulnerable, roofline sagging, foundation crumbling.

  Several of these magnificent hulks dotted the island. Anna had wandered through most of them, a pleasant break in the monotony.

  Nostalgia, memories of lives never lived but only imagined, dwelt in the silent dust-filled halls, the moldering books left on the shelves, the broken furniture stashed in enormous cellars; in a moth-eaten fur abandoned in an upstairs nursery. There was something fascinating in the flotsam of the past, once valued things discarded when their owners moved on.

  When they reached the south end of the island, the road unraveled into poorly marked byways leading to various NPS facilities. AI timegotiated unerringly through the knot and turned at last onto the street where they stayed. Several houses and two barracks were scattered beneath oak trees on the east side of the road. A garage and storage barn were on the right. Further down this minuscule Main Street the maintenance buildings clustered. The structures were all of wood, scoured to vintage softness by the ocean winds.

  Wherever metal touched-door hinges, nailheads, window locksstreaks of burnt orange attested to the constant rust.

  At eleven at night all was dark and deserted but for the house that quartered fire crew. The screened-in porch was aglow from lights spilling out the open door. Behind the wiquitous row of boots, banned from the interior by Guy in an attempt to slow the migration of the dunes from outside to in, Anna could see people lounging in metal folding chairs. The spark of a cigarette butt traced a slow are to someone's mouth.

  Lynette Wagner, Cumberland's GS-4 interpretive ranger, stood in the doorway, yellow light turning the brown frizz of a shoulderlength perm to red. Her laughter bobbed on top of the hum of conversation. Iwo shadows hovered near her, Dijon and Rick ilo doubt. Lynette always had boys dancing attendance. She was not yet thirty, single, and good-enough looking, but it was more than just her physical charms. Somehow she'd managed to strike the perfect balance between being one of the boys and being one of the girls. A tomboy with a strong maternal instinct; the combination drew men like flies. Everything they could want: mother, buddy, and lover rolled into one.

  For all Anna could tell, it was genuine-Lynette to the coreand she found it as attractive as the men did though probably not for the same reasons.

  the chairs were occupied by Cumberland's district ranger and his alarmingly pregnant wife. The district ranger, lodd Belfore, spent much of each day with fire crew. He'd only been on the island five months and already he was bored. Mostly he grumbled about being in charge of law enforcement where enforcing law wasn't allowed. Word had come down that the wealthy denizens of Cumberland were "not accustomed to interference." Tourists were fair game but they were disappointingly well behaved.

  Anna had met Tabby, his wife, only once before. The woman was so big with child that when Anna first laid eyes on her, she'd made a mental note to review her emergency childbirth procedures.

  Mrs. Belfore was a small-boned woman, pale and blond and clingy.

  There weren't many moments when she wasn't clutching some part of her husband's anatomy. In a pinch even a sleeve or shirttail sufficed. Tonight she seemed particularly in need of reassurance. She held his right forearm in a death rip, his hand palm up on her lap like a dead white spider. Under the circums
tances Anna didn't hold Tabby's neediness against her but she hadn't found much to say to the woman either.

  Lynette said something indecipherable and Rick laughed too loud and too long.

  "Party. Party," AI said neutrally. Anna couldn't tell if he was being sarcastic or merely observant.

  She dug in her pocket for a coin." Heads or tails?"

  "The phone's all your'n, His. Pigeon," he replied." If jimmy's not in bed by now, he should be."

  Anna traded up, leaving the pumper truck for Guy's ATV. When he'd claimed the four-wheeler the crew boss made noises about convenience and flexibility, but he was fooling no one. He took it because it was fun. And he was entitled. No one begrudged him.

  On the all-terrain vehicle the night swirled around Anna, dried the sweat in her hair. Even the noise of its little engine didn't detract. Over the short trip to the office she passed four armadillos rooting alongside the road. The weird little beasts delighted her.