Ill Wind (6 page)

“Checking up on me, eh?” He reached down and pulled up a blade of grass to chew on.

“Good morning, Ted,” Stacy said.

“Ted,” Anna echoed the greeting. “We need to talk with Tom Silva. Is he working this stretch of line?”

“You girl rangers really make a difference.” Greeley winked at Anna. “In the construction business all I ever see are men’s ugly pusses. Say, how’s that wife of yours, Stacy? Still eating your cooking?”

Stacy just smiled.

“And how’s my little Bella?”

“Bella’s fine.” Stacy’s tone was icy and Anna sensed a sudden hostility. “Dispatch said Tom Silva was working this section. Do you know where we can find him?” Stacy dragged the conversation back to business.

Greeley’s smile broadened. “Tom in some kind of trouble? Let me know if any of my boys get out of line. You know what they say: you get in bed with somebody, it pays to stay friendly.”

“No trouble,” Stacy said stiffly. “We just need to talk with him.”

“Help yourself.” Greeley gestured down the hill. “He’s holding the dumb end of the tape for an overpaid surveyor, so don’t keep him too long. Anna.” He tipped an imaginary hat as he brushed by her.

The surveyor was at the bottom of the ravine setting up his tripod. “Silva?” Anna asked as they approached.

“Keep walking,” the man replied without taking his eyes from his instruments. Ahead, down a fresh-cut line, a second man sat on a boulder smoking a cigarette.

“Tom Silva?” Anna asked when they were close enough to be heard.

“You’re looking at him.” Silva blew smoke out in a thin stream and looked Anna up and down. The half smile on his lips suggested she should feel complimented.

She didn’t.

“I’m Anna Pigeon. This is Stacy Meyers. Can you take a break for a minute? We’d like to talk to you.”

“Taking five, Bobby,” Silva shouted past them. “Somebody set the law dogs on me.” He smiled up at Anna. “Pull up a rock and sit down.”

Anna crouched, rocking back on her heels, her forearms resting on her knees. Stacy remained standing, seeming tall as a willow from her new vantage point.

For a moment Silva studied them, and Anna him. The morning’s heat was beginning to collect in the canyon, held close by the oakbrush thickets. Shirtless, rivulets of sweat traced trails through the dust on Silva’s smooth chest. Stick-straight black hair stuck out from beneath a battered, straw cowboy hat. With his unlined olive skin and dark eyes, he was pretty rather than handsome.

Meeting Anna’s eyes, he crushed out his cigarette and pointedly tucked the butt into the rolled cuff of his jeans. “No litter here,” he said. “This is a national fucking park.”

A challenge: Anna chose to ignore it.

“Patsy asked us to talk with you, Tom,” she said evenly.

“What’s old Pats up to now?” He shook another Marlboro from the pack that rested beside him on the rock, then made a show of offering one to Anna and Stacy.

Anna declined. Stacy just shook his head.

“Suit yourself. Mind if I do?” The question was rhetorical and neither bothered to reply. Silva didn’t light the cigarette but played with it between his fingers. The gesture was so classically phallic that Anna felt tired.

“Patsy’s concerned that some of the presents you’ve been giving her might have more than one meaning,” she began. “This latest—attention—has her fairly upset.”

“So she screamed for the rangers? God, Pats loves a good scene.”

“Your ex-wife—”

“My wife,” Tom interrupted.

“—would be more comfortable if you stayed away from her.”

“Hey, a man’s got a right to work. She’s always hollering I don’t pay enough goddamn child support, now she’s trying to lose me my job. Christ!”

“Patsy’s not trying to get you fired, Tom. She mentioned specifically that she didn’t want that to happen. She just wants you to stay away from her.”

“What grounds, man? She’s got my kids, for Christ’s sake.” Tom quit playing with the cigarette and lit it, striking a wooden match with an expert—and probably much rehearsed—flick of his thumbnail. “There ain’t no way she can keep me from going over there. I’ve never done a damn thing, not one damn thing she can hold up in a court of law to say I can’t. Hell, I never even hit her.”

“I believe you, Tom,” Anna said soothingly. “But there’s a thing called harassment. Patsy has pretty strong feelings about some of your gifts.”

Tom shook his head. Smoke poured from his nostrils. His eyes were fixed on a point beyond Anna’s left shoulder. Behind her she could hear Stacy shifting his weight.

“She’s got a scrap of skin in an envelope, Tom. She said it was foreskin. That’s a pretty loaded thing to send somebody.” Anna was uncomfortably aware of the unintentional humor. She heard Stacy clearing his throat, a small cough that could have been thwarted laughter.

Fortunately Tom seemed not to pick up on it. For a moment he sat smoking and Anna waited, letting the silence soak in, work for her.

“Christ! It was a joke,” he finally burst out.

Stacy spoke for the first time. “A joke? It must’ve hurt like crazy. Where’s the funny part?”

Tom looked up at him, his mouth twisted with irritation. “I didn’t take a fucking knife to myself, if that’s what you mean. The doc did it. Pats had been after me for years. I thought she’d like it.”

“You got circumcised in your thirties?” Stacy asked. Anna bit back a laugh at the “oh ouch!” she could hear under the words.

“That’s right.” Tom smiled; his teeth were square and white. “Barnum and Bailey got a new tent.”

Inwardly, Anna sighed. “Here’s where we stand, Tom. You, Patsy, me—we’ve all got to live together on this mesa top. At least for a while. I’d suggest that you steer clear of Patsy. If you’ve got visiting rights to your kids, you two work that out. I’ll ask Patsy to file whatever agreement you reach at the chief ranger’s office. You stick to that and you won’t have to deal with us, okay?”

“Fuck!” Tom flicked his cigarette butt into the brush. Anna didn’t even follow it with her eyes. “Why don’t you rangers do your job instead of hassling people that work for a living? You get a fucking free ride from the government and can’t even keep the fucking roads safe. Monday night a big goddamn truck nearly ran me off the road. Where the hell were you then? Christ!”

“We’ll look into that.” Pushing herself to her feet, Anna heard both ankles crack in protest.

“Will that be all,
ranger?
”

“Almost,” Anna returned. “Just find that cigarette you tossed and put it out and we’ll be out of your hair. Fire danger’s bad this year. Manning Class four yesterday.”

“Find it yourself,” Silva muttered.

“I got it.” Stacy had crushed the life from the butt and now tucked the filter into his pocket.

“Good enough for me,” Anna said. “Take it easy, Tom.”

“Yeah.”

 

 

WHEN they’d passed the surveyor and were climbing out of the ravine, Stacy said: “Foreskin is a loaded gift,” and the laughter Anna had swallowed came bubbling out.

“The way he was playing with the cigarette . . .” Anna’s laughter took over and she had to stop climbing just to breathe. “You’d think he was auditioning for the role of Johnny Wad in
Debbie Does Dallas.
”

“You mean that didn’t toss your confetti? I kind of thought I might give it a shot. Run it up the flagpole, see if the cat licks it up.”

Stacy stopped beside her. Pressed close by the brambles, Anna was aware of the smell of him: freshly laundered cotton and soap. Heat radiated from her, and it wasn’t only from the sun and the climb. Anna stifled her basic instincts and shook herself like a dog ridding its fur of water drops.

Abruptly, she turned and pushed up the side of the ravine. In places it was so steep she pulled herself along using the low branches. Her laughter had evaporated.

“You drive,” she said as they reached the patrol car. “These seats break my back.”

“You’re too short. This is a man’s machine. A car for Johnny Wad.” Stacy slipped behind the wheel and slid the seat back as far as it would go.

“Thanks for picking up that cigarette butt. What was I going to do? Shoot the guy? Never try to out-macho a construction worker.”

“Believe it or not, picking up litter is why I went into this business. I don’t work for the Park Service. I work for the parks.”

Anna settled back into the seat. “The NPS could use a few more fern feelers. I, for one, hope you get on permanent.”

“So do I,” Stacy said. “So do I.”

His tone was so grim, so determined, Anna dropped the subject. Everybody had to contend with their own demons. Some of hers were such old familiars she considered naming them and renting them closet space.

Leaning her head back against the vinyl headrest, she closed her eyes. Zachary was dead eight years come August. She could no longer consistently call his face to mind. Without his memory clear and present, her fortieth might turn out to be a damn lonely year.

HOUSEMATES OUT, TELEVISION OFF, ANNA HAD BEEN sleeping with glorious abandon. Deep sleep, REM sleep, sleep without nightmares. Of late a good night’s sleep had become such a rarity her fantasies about it bordered on the erotic.

Hence the cursing reluctance with which she relinquished it to answer the phone.

“Anna, Frieda. Sorry about this.”

Anna turned on her bedside light and snatched up the alarm clock: 2:02 A.M.

“Nobody else to home,” Frieda said. All law enforcement on MEVE shared an emergency party line called the ’69 line because of the last two digits of the number. Every call rang in quarters on Chapin and at Far View. Anna’d been the unlucky ranger who picked up first.

“What’s up—other than me?” Anna was already threading her legs into yesterday’s underpants.

“Got a report of lights in the maintenance yard. Somebody needs to check it out.”

“I’m headed in that direction.” Maintenance was scarcely a hundred yards from the housing loop on Chapin. Stacy would have been the logical one to respond but he never answered the ’69. Scuttlebutt was he unplugged it nights. Some said for Bella, others said Rose did the unplugging.

Loss of sleep was a trade-off for money. Every call, short or long, earned two hours’ overtime. As she buckled on her duty belt, Anna totaled it up. Two hours at time and a half was close to thirty bucks. She’d’ve paid nearly that for an uninterrupted night’s sleep.

From the patrol car, she called in service. Frieda responded—not because she had to, she wasn’t officially on duty. There would be no overtime or base pay for her. Frieda monitored because she took her job more seriously than her employers did. She didn’t like rangers out without at least rudimentary backup.

The air was cool and fresh. Anna rolled down the Ford’s windows and let the darkness blow in around her. On her first late shifts she’d had a new experience—or if not new, one she hadn’t felt for a long time, not since leaving New York City. Anna’d found herself afraid of the dark.

Walking trail in Texas, skirting islands around Isle Royale, she’d worn the night like a star-studded cloak. But Mesa Verde was all about dead people. In the mind—or the collective unconscious—there was a feeling they’d not all left in the twelve hundreds. Or if they had, perhaps whatever it was that drove them out had taken up residence in the abandoned cities. Everywhere there were reminders of another time, another world.

Given the propensity of Jamie and some of the other interpreters to capitalize on New Age voodoo, Anna never admitted her fear but she patrolled with an ear open for voices long gone, footsteps not clothed in mortal flesh.

A half-moon threw bars of silver across the road, enough to see by, and as she turned onto the spur leading to Maintenance, she clicked off her headlights. The Maintenance yard, a paved area with a gas pump in the center, was surrounded by two-story buildings: offices, garages, a carpenter’s shop, storage barns. Built in the 1940s, the buildings were of dark wood with small many-paned windows. One remnant remained from the thirties: the fire cache, where helitack stored the gear needed to fight wildland fire. It was of stone with juniper beams supporting a flat roof. Behind the cache a twelve-foot cyclone fence topped with barbed wire enclosed the construction company’s equipment behind padlocked gates.

In the inky shadow of a storage barn, the car rolled to a stop. Anna called on scene and received Frieda’s reassuring reply. Setting the brake, she listened. Pre-dawn silence, fragile and absolute, settled around her. The pop of her tires as they cooled, the clicking of insects flying against the intruder lights, pattered like dry rain.

Trickling out of the quiet, it came to her why Mesa Verde nights pricked some nerve deep in her psyche. Like New York City, the mesa was comprised of peopled dark, dark that collected in the corners of buildings and under eaves, choked alleys, and narrow streets. A darkness permeated with the baggage of humanity. Dreams and desires haunted the mesa the way they haunted the rooms in old houses. Traces of unfinished lives caught in the ether.

Anna felt her skin begin to creep. “Why don’t you just rent a video of
Hill House
and be done with it?” she mocked herself.

Another minute whispered by. Apparently nothing was going to manifest itself in her windshield. She loosed the six-cell flashlight from its charger beneath the dash.

Metal clanked on metal as she opened the car door and she froze. It wasn’t the familiar click of door mechanisms, it was what she’d been waiting for: something not right, a sound where silence ought to be.

Noise gave her direction. Leaving the car door open rather than risk a racket, she moved quietly toward the fenced construction yard. Between her car and the fence were three board-and-batten shacks used to store hand tools and pesticides. In the colorless light the short road looked like a scene from Old Tucson’s back lot.