Track Of The Cat

3

WlNClNG at the sting of water in the paper-thin saw grass cuts on her hands and arms, Anna slid down in the bath. Not a great bath by any means. Great baths had gone out with claw-foot tubs. The passion for showers that had replaced them with prefab white plastic boxes at the bottom of featureless stalls was incomprehensible to Anna.

In New York she'd lain for hours in the tub in the kitchen of a five-floor walk-up in Hell's Kitchen making pictures from the water stains on the ceiling and waiting for Zach to come home and make the wait worth her while.

Always he came home. Sometimes he made love to her. Sometimes he didn't.

Rogelio always did. Whether she wanted him to or not. Anna wondered what time it was, wondered if he would come, wondered if she cared, and took another sip of wine. Mondavi Red, her vin ordinaire. It was cheap, came in big bottles, traveled well in a backpack, and didn't taste half bad. Sipping again, she enjoyed the feeling of heat within and heat without unknotting her mind.

Piedmont sat just outside the bathroom door. His eyes glowed red in the light of the single candle. His thick, yellow-striped tail was curled neatly over his forepaws. Piedmont liked the sound of running water. Anna thought it was because he was probably born of a feral mother near the banks of the Black River somewhere down by Rattlesnake Springs. He would never come near the tub though. Perhaps because he'd half drowned in a flash flood. After the monsoon's worst cloudburst the July before, Anna had found him tangled in dead branches in the crotch of a tree.

The cat closed his eyes: going into his river trance.

Anna's gaze moved to the candlelight on the bath water, then, idly, down the length of her body. At thirty-nine she still retained her boyish figure but her skin didn't fit quite so snugly as it once had. Elbows, knees, neck, wherever the bending went on, there were wrinkles. Her muscles-better defined than when she was twenty-were beginning to look ropey. Still, it was a good body. Even in the face of the changing physical fashions touted in the glossy magazines, she had always liked it fine. A strong body: easy to maintain.

The water was unknotting her hair, unweaving the copper and the silver strands from the single braid she kept them locked in and spreading them around her shoulders like seaweed.

Ophelia drowned, Anna thought, or, in the New York theatrical agents' parlance of Molly's Friday ten o'clock: "An old Ophelia type."

A dead woman.

What was left of Sheila Drury had been wrapped in garbage bags. The park, bless its optimistic little heart, didn't boast a body bag. The green shiny bundle that had once been the Dog Canyon Ranger had been loaded onto a Stokes litter- a rolling wire-mesh stretcher-and trundled, carried, and wrestled down the stone-filled canyons.

Paul had been consummately professional. Anna had tried to appear that way though a hundred exceedingly tasteless jokes had stampeded through her mind during the long trek out. The seasonals-two naturalists and a ranger-who had come to assist were mostly quiet and sensible. The naturalists were both men-Craig Eastern and Manny Mankins. Cheryl Light was the seasonal law enforcement ranger.

A high percentage of National Park Service employees were summer seasonals. Winter found Guadalupe Mountains down to a skeleton staff. Most of the seasonals were highly educated. A number had advanced degrees. Some had families to support. Yet they left jobs and homes and husbands and wives for the privilege of living in a dormitory and working for six dollars and fifty-four cents an hour, no retirement, no benefits, and rent deducted automatically.

Many hoped, one day, to become permanent but the openings were few and closely guarded by tangled thickets of red tape. Anna knew Manny had been trying to get on permanently since his son was born four years before.

Craig Eastern's situation was a little different. He was a herpetologist on a two-year detail from the University of Texas at El Paso. Anna had been surprised Paul had brought Craig up Middle McKittrick. A shaky, easily alarmed man in his early thirties, Eastern was more at home with rattlesnakes, lizards, and toads than he was with people. He viewed most of humanity askance. The world was being destroyed by humans. The Guadalupe Mountains were the last bastion of untrammeled earth.

Anna had to admit that under pressure he bore up well, admirably even. Seeing Craig lift the corpse onto the Stokes, Anna had noticed how muscular he was. His nervousness made him seem like a little man, but he was far from it. Craig Eastern had been working out with weights-for years by the look of him.

Manny Mankins was the opposite. The wiry naturalist was a man of small stature who seemed a great deal bigger than he was. "Bantam cock," Anna's mother-in-law would have called him.

Anna had fought fire alongside the skinny, sandy-haired man for seventeen days. He'd worked everyone into the ground. That was on the Foolhen fire in Idaho. They'd slammed fire line twenty-two hours straight. Manny was still cracking jokes, swinging a Pulaski when the rest of the crew was barely scraping theirs over the duff.

The bath was growing tepid. Anna pushed the hot water on with her big toe, poured herself another glass of cabernet from the bottle on the toilet seat. Settling back in physical content, she let the image of the seasonal law enforcement ranger drift behind her half-closed eyes.

Cheryl Light was new to the park, entering on duty only a couple of weeks before. Stocky-around five-foot-five and maybe a hundred and fifty pounds-with shoulder-length permed hair. Anna placed her age somewhere between thirty-five and forty-five. With woodsy types it was hard to tell. Their skin wrinkled prematurely from sun and weather but their vitality was ageless.

Usually Cheryl laughed a lot. The kind of laugh that made others laugh too, even before they knew what the joke was. There'd been no laughter that day.

Cheryl had carried Drury's pack and, over the rough spots, one end of the Stokes litter. The woman was powerful but that's not what stuck in Anna's mind. What had impressed her was the unobtrusive way Cheryl had supported, eased, bolstered, comforted, bucked-up everybody around her. Apparently she did it without effort or even knowledge that she was doing it. A well-timed smile, a touch, a proffered drink from her water bottle.

Anna envied it. Kindness-true, unadulterated kindness-was beyond her.

If Cheryl's kindness was legitimate, Anna's resident cynic interjected the customary sour note. Unadulterated, altruistic kindness? It went against the grain. Still and all, it was kindness.

"I think too much to be kind," she excused herself to a disinterested cat. Had Cheryl found a way to laugh about it by now? Though she and Craig and Manny were all business at the scene, there would be jokes tonight after a few beers and, maybe, for Craig, some nightmares. Probably Anna wouldn't hear much about it and Paul, nothing. Everyone pretended there was no wall between the permanent National Park Service employees and the seasonals. And everyone knew there was. A veritable bureaucratic Jericho with no Joshua in sight. Everyone was transient. Seasonals came and went like stray cats. Even permanent employees seldom stayed in one place more than a few years, not if they wanted to advance their careers. People who "homesteaded"-stayed in one park too long-tended to come to think of the place as theirs; they developed their own ideas of how it should be run. The NPS didn't care for that. It made people less tractable, less willing to follow party line dictated from half a continent away.

Karl Johnson, the man who tended Guadalupe's stock, had been with the Park Service for fifteen years yet he'd never been promoted higher than GS-5, the grade of a beginning seasonal. His love of these mountains had cost him a lot. Sometimes Anna wondered if it wasn't worth it. Personally, the dashing from place to place made for unsettled lives; professionally, for duplicated paperwork and unfinished projects.

And the death of Sheila Drury, was it finished? Anna had been amazed at how little time the official investigation had taken. Benjamin Jakey, a sheriff out of El Paso and one of his deputies-a Pillsbury Doughboy look-alike who'd never stopped puffing from the hike in-had done some perfunctory poking around. "Yep. Lion got her. Surprised it don't happen more often," Sheriff Jakey said and the deputy puffed portentously. Jakey had looked through the grass, gone over the sketches Anna had made of the scene. The deputy shot a couple rolls of film and told Anna they wouldn't need hers.

That had been about it. The Feds would have it now-the park was federal land. But they would rubber-stamp it, Anna assumed.

Everyone would be surprised, here in the "wilderness," that lion kills didn't happen more often. "More often," Anna said aloud. More often than what. More often than never? Than once a decade? What? She must remember to find out come morning. And come morning, she had to write a witness statement for the county coroner, Nina Dietz.

It was she they had delivered the body to. Looking more like Aunt Bea than the keeper of the dead, she'd been waiting with the ambulance in the McKittrick Visitors Center parking lot. She'd ridden with Paul as he'd driven the body away.

No more Sheila Drury.

And, one day, no more Anna Pigeon. It was a sobering thought. Anna took a deep drink of her wine.

The front door opened, then clicked softly shut again. Piedmont slunk away to hide under the kitchen table. Anna heard a tape drop into the boom-box: Guy Clark's "Rita Ballou."

Rogelio.

Now, for a while, there would be other things to think about.

"Ana." A tap on the bathroom door and it swung inward. Anna liked the way he said her name. The Spanish "Ana," soft, beseeching. She liked his rebelliousness. They'd met while she was on special detail for the US Forest Service in Pagosa Springs, Colorado. Anna had arrested him for chaining himself to the blade of a bulldozer scheduled to cut road into a timber sale. He'd smiled at her and he'd winked. She liked the way he looked. The candlelight glanced off the flat planes of his face, threw his eyes into deep shadow, and glinted off the rich brown of his curling hair. Roger Cooper. Rogelio. A displaced Irish/Israeli from Chicago conducting his own brand of desert warfare.

He slipped in, knelt by the tub with a childish grace. His hands dipped under the water, rested cool on her waist.

"No trouble this time. Just a lot of talking and drinking cerveza," he said. "The Border Patrol hardly stopped me. They must be getting used to my old bug."

"They don't have much of a problem with middle-class white men with Illinois plates sneaking into Texas," Anna said. The El Paso Border station was more concerned with illegal aliens than drugs. And something in his proud assumption of wickedness made her want to deflate him now and again. Eco-defenders had altogether too much fun fighting the good fight. They looked in the mirror and a little too often to overly impress Anna. "And the beer and the talk, that's the best part, isn't it?" Still, she was smiling and she'd moved her hands to cover his.

"Not the best part," Rogelio said, his voice liquid. "You are the best part."

The Clark tape came to an end and the player automatically clicked over to the second cassette. The Chenille Sisters singing, "I Wanna Be Seduced." Anna laughed.

She did.

Anna did some of her best thinking after making love, curled warm and satisfied in the curve of Zach's shoulder. Of Rogelio's shoulder, she corrected herself without pity. The mind is clearer when the body is quiet.

"Rogelio, are you still awake?"

"Depends," came a slow answer and she felt the warmth of his hand at her breast.

She caught it and held it somewhere near the floating ribs- less distracting real estate. "I keep thinking about the Drury Lion Kill." Already, in self-defense-or natural callousness, Anna was not sure-she'd dubbed the death of the woman from Dog Canyon the "Drury Lion Kill." Though something about the phrase bothered her. "I wonder why she was messing around up there. She wasn't on transect. Middle McKittrick is closed."

"That's what rangers do," Rogelio replied and his smile warmed the darkness. "Go all the good places us mere mortals are shut out of. Everybody knows that."

"Seriously. Who in their right mind would drag a full pack down that canyon on a contraband lark?" Rogelio's hand was trying to wriggle free, his lips brushed her neck.

"Mmmm," he purred, "you're doing it to me again. God but I'm crazy for you, Ana."

Anna tried to fix her mind on the saw grass, the vultures.

"One of your pet kitty cats ate a ranger," Rogelio said and his hand slid down to her thighs. "Lions do that, querida. They're meat eaters."

"Seriously-" Anna said and again caught his hands.

"Seriously," Rogelio replied and pulled her to him.

Even as she responded, she ached for Zachary, for some good, old-fashioned conversation.

First thing in the morning she would call Molly. First thing.

"Reality check," Anna said. She pressed her mouth close to the phone.

"I've only got seven minutes till Mrs. Claremont."

"I found a dead body."

"What's that sound in the background? Where are you?"

"At the pay phone by the washer and dryer in the Cholla Chateau in the Rec. Hall. That's the dryer. It squeaks," Anna explained. Molly knew where she was. She was just being difficult.

"Get a phone. A real phone."

"I promise."

"Okay. A body. Human or otherwise?"

"A woman. I found her up Middle McKittrick Canyon yesterday on my lion transect."

There was a moment's silence. Anna waited through it. Molly was lighting a cigarette. Not for the first time, Anna was amazed that Molly's patients stood it. One hundred and fifty dollars an hour and they had to breathe tobacco smoke. "Middle McKittrick," Molly said. "That's one of those bloody awful washes you've got down there, isn't it?"

"That's right." Anna glanced at her pocket watch. "Four minutes till Mrs. Claremont."

"Mrs. Claremont will still be neurotic in fifteen. Tell me."

Anna told Molly everything as she had since she was five and her sister was eleven. She told her of the vultures, the tears, the saw grass, the ghosts, the paw prints, the claw marks. Occasionally Molly interrupted with a question, clarifying, Anna knew, the very precise picture she was putting together in her mind.

Mrs. Claremont had been cooling her heels in the Park View Clinic's opulent waiting room for ten minutes by the time Anna had finished.

Another brief silence. Anna waited for the summation. Already, just from talking to Molly, she felt better.

"Okay," Molly said finally. "You didn't give a damn one way or another about this Sheila Drury. Right so far?"

"Right," Anna admitted. She wished Molly would sugarcoat things now and again, but she never would.

"Death, darkness, vultures munching, brought back the bad old days after Zach was killed. That's pretty straightforward. But what I'm hearing through it all is an outraged sense of injustice. Am I close?"

Anna felt around inside her brain, probed down her esophagus, took a left at her sternum, and peered into her heart. "I guess that's right." The surprise sounded in her voice and she heard Molly's foreshortened chuckle, almost the "heh heh heh" of the cartoons.

"Because some of the wrong people die?" Molly was fishing.

"Ah… Nope."

"That you weren't hailed a hero for finding her?"

"Nope."

"Because you had to be the one to find a stinking corpse?"

Anna thought about that for a second but it wasn't it, either. Horrible as it was, she loved a good adventure. "Nope."

"I give up," Molly said. "Gotta go. Call me when you hit on it."

There was a click and Molly was gone. Ushering in Mrs. Claremont without apology, Anna didn't doubt.

Craig Eastern came in with a blue plastic basket full of uniforms and white Fruit of the Loom underpants. He didn't look at Anna as he loaded the washer and put two quarters in the slot. Maybe he figured it would make less of an intrusion that way.

Anna realized she was still holding the receiver to her ear and replaced it in its cradle. "I'm done," she announced and Craig cranked in the quarters, starting the noise of the washer.

Outraged injustice.

Anna pondered it as she walked back to her residence. Molly had put her finger right on it. That was the feeling. Anna had mixed it with other emotions, not really even recognized it. Outraged injustice. It was an emotion for the young, for those who still believed in some pure, shining vision of absolute Justice, a virgin to be outraged. Anna had felt the outrage for years when she'd been simpler, blessed enough to see the world in clear crisp black and white.

Over the years she'd been introduced to "mitigating circumstances." Everything had softened, muted into the more interesting but less dramatic shades of gray.

Why outraged injustice now? Anna rubbed the fine scratches on her arms. They were beginning to itch with healing.

Then it was clear, classic: the innocent wrongly accused.

The lion didn't do it.