Deep South (36 page)

A man commits suicide. Coincidences do happen but...  fishy."

"One does wonder, don't one?" Anna said. "We've got no proof it was suicide. Fullerton, Pastor Fullerton, is presumably on the bottom of the Big Black river with a Volkswagen bus transmission shackled around his ankles-"

"What year?"

"I don't know what year."

"Could be worth something."

"Anyway, no suicide note. Just the word of his two buddies, also at Rocky Springs the night of the Posey murder."

"You think he might be tied into the girl's death?"

"Makes me nervous is all." They pondered over another round of Scotch.

Drinking from the bottle, passing it back and forth in the cab of an antique pickup truck, created a mood of timelessness, of grassroots, round-the-campfire humanity. Anna felt utterly at home, a sensation she'd been missing since she'd accepted the promotion to the district ranger position in Mississippi. "Was Pastor Fullerton connected in anyway to the Poseys?" Steve asked. Dusk had crept out of the woods and was caressing the truck. He turned the key and switched on the radio, his only concession to modern automotive luxury. The station featured oldies, very oldies, Fats Domino singing

"Blueberry Hill" in a voice as rich as Mississippi mud. "No connection I know of," Anna said. "Sheriff Davidson left me a report a day or two ago. He'd talked with the Poseys.

No church connection. No schools, hunting camp, social club that jumped out at me.

I'll ask again, given the new developments. I was thinking maybe Fullerton knew something. Saw something be shouldn't have, and his comrades-in-arms shut him up, but Paul said-" Anna hesitated a moment, feeling the odd and pleasurable sensation of saying the "boyfriend's" name out loud. The Scotch was kicking in in her brainpan as well. "Paul said the three of them were near and dear, boyhood pals."

"We mostly get offed by family and friends," Steve said philosophically.

"Murder's like Christmas, people seem to want to be with their loved ones when it comes around."

"Williams-one of the two pals in question-said he'd gotten a call from Fullerton saying he was going swimming with the VW engine and rushed to the pastor's aid too late to save him. If it was murder, my money's on Williams. Who else?"

"Hey. Do alligators eat carrion?" Stilwell asked suddenly. "I wonder if the pastor will be munched." Anna didn't know much about the culinary habits of alligators.

"They like dogs," she offered. "Maybe they taste like chicken." Their conversation was sliding gently into the Scotch bottle. That was okay by Anna. "If Fullerton was murdered because be saw something and he was murdered by Williams-always go with the obvious is my motto-then did Williams have any connection to the Posey girl?" she asked.

"Can't help you there. Getting hungry?"

"I could eat," Anna said.

"Taco Bell?"

"Better than that," Steve said as if better than Taco Bell was pretty doggone hard to imagine. "I am a man of many talents." Bending his wiry frame into intriguing shapes, he reached over the back of the seat and fished around. Finally he emerged with a paper sack, the top rolled to keep the contents from escaping. "You cooked?" Anna was impressed. "I constructed," Stilwell corrected her. "Cooking is a modest art compared to that of engineering the perfect sandwich." By the light of the April moon they dined on peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches and Scotch and listened to the rising chorus of frogs and golden hits from the thirties, forties and fifties on 93.9 FM.

Afterward they drank coffee from a thermos Steve had under the seat.

Coffee, lacking the insouciance of alcohol, was dispensed in separate but equalcups.

Business was laid to rest. They didn't so much talk as swap stories, funny stories. As often as not, stories in which the teller was the butt of the joke. Anna could not have planned a more perfect evening. When the disk jockey announced it was ten of ten, she was amazed. Surely time had stopped the moment the truck door closed. The rude interjection of the clock reminded Stilwell he had to be up at four-thirty to get to Tupelo in time for a seven-thirty class he was taking on agricultural methods.

He waited till Anna was safe in her Rambler, then drove off, the guttural roar of the pickup's engine recalling a time when power was new and raw and had moving parts.

Not ready yet to start the forty-minute drive to Rocky, Anna sat behind the wheel of her car and closed her eyes, letting the raucous celebration of night sounds swirl in her head. On the mesas of southern Colorado, night was a time of stillness. Predators moved with stealthy grace, quiet as shadows. Birds ceased singing.

Cicadas hushed their clatter, Compared with that, Mississippi could have been the template for Maurice Sendak's In the Night Kitchen.

It sounded as if all manner of strange things had come out to play.

In this fecund matrix of mating frogs, pollinating bats, creeping kudzu, things procreating, eating and being eaten, growing and dying, where even the stars lost their distant and pristine coldness to hang close to the Earth, as integrated into the frenzy as the fireflies that blinked their need in the cloaking scrub, Anna's mind turned on the men that, in their need, risked family, position and disease to relieve themselves with strangers in her woods. And litter during the process.

What pressures built in them that brought them here? Did they sit at their desks in offices, feeling dull and lonely? Did they worry about mortgages and braces for the kids, then, feeling overwhelmed and afraid, turn their thoughts to the end of the day, to excitement with a stranger, a sense of freedom and physical comfort for a moment? Did it matter what the strangers looked like, or just that they were strangers?

Did they talk? What if it turned out to be someone they knew? Was there shame or a secret shared?

The phenomenon had to be emotionally costly. Secret lives, though they paid dividends in thrills, had a nasty habit of growing as burdensome as the life they had been constructed to escape from. To keep the payoff coming, stakes had to be constantly raised, new risks taken.

It was an area where Anna's knowledge was, at best, secondhand. TO arrest an addict did not require an understanding of the mechanics of addiction. That was Molly's stomping grounds.

Her mind drifted, taking her back to when she'd first had an inkling of the humble pullout's kinkier aspects. Barth had been driving. He'd turned in. He'd said...  what? Anna searched for his exact words.

"Clinton pullout's kind of a problem area." When he said that, Anna had assumed an explanation would be forthcoming, but that hadn't been the case. Barth suddenly shut down, told her the cars belonged to nonexistent joggers and sped away as if pursued. The next day he'd been distracted, depressed and, unless her instincts failed her, acting guilty as sin. Was Barth gay? Or whatever these guys who littered the public's little patch of woods were? Barth had a wife and children, but that was meaningless. According to Steve, this particular brand of park visitor lived the rest of his life as a practicing heterosexual right down to procreation and probably homophobia.

Barth as a frequenter of homosexual trysting grounds didn't fit.

For one thing, in his own district, he would be far too recognizable.

Besides, be hadn't gotten weird till after they'd driven into the parking lot in front of the picnic table. That's when he'd changed. And stayed changed.

Anna sat up straight, rubbed the encroaching sleep from her face and scrubbed her fingernails through her cropped hair to stimulate thought.

It was the truck. There'd been three cars and a truck at the pullout when she and Barth had driven through. The truck had a rebel flag on the bumper with the words HERITAGE, NOT HATE stenciled across the bottom.

"Ob shit," Anna whispered. She knew why Fullerton was dead.

And she knew why Barth Dinkin had donned a hair shirt.

Guilt decreed that Anna stretch out on the Navajo rug in front of the cold stove and spend some quality time with Taco, the crippled wonder dog. Scotch and the sandman ambushed her there. She awoke just before dawn aching in most places a body can ache. There had been a time she'd been able to spring up mightily from a night on a hard floor-or a time creative memory insisted she had-but during the intervening years her bones had become cantankerous.

She made coffee and drank it in the shower, trusting the heat within and the heat without to melt the precocious rigor mortis and restore a semblance of life.

The precarious optimism lent by hot water and coffee was threatened when, on leaving, she found a paper sack on the top of her patrol vehicle. Inside were the dismembered parts of some small animal, probably a squirrel. Grim and chilling images of The Godfather and waking up with the severed head of a horse in one's bed were stirring her hackles to the vertical when she discovered the note. "Went squirrel hunting. Nothing like good red meat for a sick dog.

Frank." On her way out, Anna thanked the maintenance man for the thoughtful gift, then surreptitiously dumped it in the garbage can in the tiny visitor's center, careful to bury it beneath a layer of other refuse so Frank wouldn't inadvertently see it and get his feelings hurt when he collected the trash.

Barth was already at the ranger station by the time Anna arrived.

Randy wasn't due on duty till four Pm. That suited Anna just fine.

It galled her to feel driven from her space by one of her own rangers, but she'd lived with wormwood and gall off and on since joining the park service. Unlike some, she'd never developed a taste for the bitterness.

Long ago she'd promised herself, should she burn out, begin to grow bitter, she'd quit and get a job waiting tables or welding.

Sitting at his desk, Barth had the look of a man who needed a good night's sleep, but when he looked up at her, his eyes were clear and his face animated. Either he'd recovered his equilibrium in the aftermath of Fullerton's death or he'd found something to distract himself with.

It turned out to be the latter. Books and magazines were spread over his desk. On a scrap of clean folded cotton was the buckle Anna bad picked up on the Old Trace.

"Looks like you might of stumbled on an important find," Barth said with the excitement of a born curator watching history materialize as a hologram trapped in a fragment from another time.

Anna had much on her mind and none of it had to do with the accoutrements of dead soldiers, but as she knew the topic she would introduce was going to be painful, she gave Barth her attention.

Pinching the brass buckle delicately between thumb and forefinger, he held it up for her to look at but not to touch. "See the engraving there, that round etching?" Anna peered dutifully at the artifact, but though she was still in denial about it, her ability to see tiny things was nowhere near what it once had been. "Uh-huh," she said. "Here." Impatiently Barth plucked the magnifying glasses off his nose and pushed them into her hands.

Anna put them on. "Yes. Right. An eagle-y thing and OVI. Cool." She had no idea what it meant but didn't want to be a wet blanket.

"Some of the regiments stamped or engraved identifying marks on their equipment. Sort of a precursor to today's dog tags. That way they could tell what regiment or squad a man had belonged to even if his face was unrecognizable s in the case of damage from the war itself or because the body was either not found or not recovered before the animals got at it. There was a detachment sent out by General Grant to Port Gibson.

Five men, handpicked. It was in Vicksburg just before Grant pulled out.

The whole detachment vanished. Nobody knew if Grant changed his orders, they got lost in the confusion of the next campaign, they went A.W.O.L. or what, but they never reported back to Vicksburg."

"I heard that story," Anna said. "Bits of it anyway. "I think this buckle belonged to one of the men from the lost squadron. They were all from Ohio. They'd been together since the start of the war. Three of them were brothers. That was what some thought, they got fed up and headed home to Ohio early This here's an Ohio state seal: OVI, Ohio Volunteer Infantry. There's a lot of boys from Ohio fought down here, but this may be something." This time when Anna said "cool," she meant it. Barth damped her enthusiasm by adding: "When you moved it, much of its historical value was lost of course, but it's still the first concrete piece of evidence that those soldiers passed this way on their road to wherever."

"I can show you exactly where I found it," Anna defended herself.

"It's not the same." Barth replaced the buckle on the cotton cloth and redeemed his reading glasses from Anna.

She remembered what she'd come to talk about and settled herself in Randy Thigpen's chair, facing Barth over the littered expanse of the old wooden desks. "That night you and I went to the Clinton pullout," Anna said without preamble. "A truck was parked there, a new Dodge with a rebel flag on the bumper. I saw the truck before in Rocky Springs campground. The truck belonged to Leo Fullerton, didn't it?" Barth looked up from his catalogs of war paraphernalia. He took the reading glasses off and placed them neatly to one side. After a pause so long Anna thought he wasn't going to answer her, he said: "Pastor Fullerton is dead. Why don't we let him rest in peace?" It was not in Anna's plan to wantonly besmirch the memory of the beloved pastor. "The man's personal life is only of importance to me insofar as it has an impact on the park," Anna said. "I couldn't care less if the guy was gay. But he was at Rocky the night Danni Posey was murdered. Then he shows up dead, a suicide without a suicide note, reported by his two buddies who also happen to have been camped at Rocky Springs on prom night. The good pastor has a convenient history of depression. It crossed my mind that his late-night swim with a piston engine was not by choice, that he didn't kill himself but was hustled off to greener pastures by Williams and McIntire for reasons that would be of interest to me. So if Leo Fullerton had a reason to kill himself, a reason he might very well not want to explain in a note, I need to know it." Barth picked up the glasses again and studied them as if they might have acquired a hidden historical nuance since their days on the rack at Wal-Mart.