Borderline: A Novel Part 19

"She'd still have had brown eyes, wouldn't she?" Anna asked.

"I guess she would at that," Paul put in. "But Helena wouldn't necessarily, not if her father didn't."

"Helena's father was a white man," Anna concluded. "If her mother was married to a white person and most white persons are American in this part of the United States, why would her mother have to sneak across the border at the height of the river's flooding?"

"Because he never married her," Freddy said flatly.

The four of them digested that unsavory thought for a minute. Paul kissed a sleeping Helena on top of her feathery head. "Lucky for you Hollywood made being born out of wedlock a badge of honor," he told the baby.

ANNA WOULD HAVE liked to sleep in-she would have loved to sleep for a week-but it was not to be. Helena and the National Park Service deemed the Davidson and the Martinez families were to rise early. Anna was still in the changing room, marveling at how much stuff it took to tend to one small sc.r.a.p of humanity, when Freddy grumbled out of the master bedroom and called Paul to the phone.

Curious, Anna carried the baby back into the kitchen to listen in on the conversation.

"Sure," Paul said. "We can be there in an hour, does that work for you?" He listened and Anna listened and his face grew stonier.

"What?" she whispered.

He ignored her. Into the phone he said: "No. Anna's the only one who saw her. Your best bet is Anna. Do you want to talk to her?"

Anna was reaching for the phone with her free hand but evidently whoever was on the other end of the line did not want to talk to her.

"No," Paul said again and coldly. "I'm afraid I can't be of much help." Again he listened briefly. His face softened up. "Sure, no problem, we'll see you in an hour or so."

"That was Jessie Wiggins," he told Anna before she could ask. "They're doing the body recovery today. They want us to go with them and show them where Carmen fell."

"They want you to go show them where Carmen fell," Anna said hollowly. Immediately she was ashamed at her naked emotion. Evil she could deal with, stupid was harder, pathetic curled her insides. Where was her righteous anger? Righteous rage was what she needed right now, a shot of good old-fashioned hate to buck her up. She couldn't find it.

Hollowness wasn't precisely an emotion; it was a lack thereof, a confusion of nothing because, other than the elusiu thdthve anger, Anna didn't know what to feel. A little insanity, a little maternity and she was cut out of the life she'd known for the past decade or more. s.e.xism was a word she'd never use out loud, not in front of the boys, certainly. It wasn't near as bad as it had been when she started out and she dared to hope it would be virtually nonexistent to the women coming of age in the twenty-first century. For now it was damped down but it was not gone. Societal pressures had forced old pract.i.tioners of the dark art underground, but time had yet to cull them from the collective conscious.

Men around her had occasionally shot somebody. Rangers had burnt out, gone over to the other side, fallen apart, showed up drunk at firearms practice. A few had been fired, one she knew of put in jail, most had quit of their own volition. These guys would have been frozen out to some extent before they found their way out-or were tossed out-of the NPS.

But Anna had done none of that. She'd burst into tears in a shrink's office and she'd carried a seven-pound h.o.m.o sapiens in her arms for less than twenty-four hours and yet she was given the pariah treatment as surely as the ranger/felons and ranger/drunks.

No, she realized. She was not being treated as a leper. She was being treated as a helpless, ignorant member of the general public. In other words, as if she didn't count when it came to taking actions or making decisions. The shunning wasn't because Bernard or Jessie or anybody else disliked her or even particularly distrusted her. They didn't want her on the body recovery because she did not want to stay in the box they had put her in.

"There's no reason I should go," she said. "I am on vacation."

"The rockslide is a gigantic maze," Paul said. "I doubt I can find where she fell. Between the two of us we should be able to."

He was lying. They'd left marks all over h.e.l.l and gone coming up that slide. The ledge where they'd camped out for a while probably still had smudgy muddy b.u.t.t prints from where the kids had sat, not to mention the smear of blood on the face of the boulder where Carmen had bounced on her way down.

She loved him for the lie but in a flash of insight she knew she didn't need it. The hollow feeling wasn't because she was rejected or female or petty or suppressing anger; it was because she was feeling nothing. She simply did not give a rat's a.s.s what the guys were doing or thinking. There were things she needed to do and was better doing them alone.

"No," she told her husband. "You go. I want to drive up and check on Cyril and Steve and Chrissie."

"I'd guess they're flying home today after all that's happened," Paul said, eyeing her narrowly, looking for pain she might be trying to hide from him.

"Maybe but I need to go anyhow."

The return to normalcy of her tone rea.s.sured him.

"Okay. I'm off to find a corpse."

"Have fun."

"Give me a kiss. Men who kiss their wives good-bye are significantly less likely to have automobile accidents on their way to work. Did you know that?"

"You're not driving," Anna reminded him but kissed him anyway because she could.

Anna was loath to leave Helena, not because she didn't think Lisa would take good care of her-better care than Anna could-but because she was afraid by the time she got back one or more bureaucracies would have conspired to spirit the little girl away into places children were better off avoiding, like foster care. Helena had sufficient birth trauma for a lifetime's neurosis should she choose it. She did not need any more.

Lisa promised she would keep the forces of evil at bay and that Helena would be safe and sound and there when Anna returned.

"We won't camp in your guest room forever," Anna promised after thanking her. "We've got reservations at the lodge tomorrow night. That was when we were supposed to come in off the river."

"You have to stay here," Lisa said. "This little one has to eat." She was holding Helena, Edgar in a sling snuggled in where arms and b.r.e.a.s.t.s and cuckoo babies hadn't usurped his mother's chest.

Anna hadn't thought of that. She could buy formula but there was no place to heat it in the rooms at the lodge. It wouldn't matter in the end. Helena wasn't hers to keep. She needed to go to a loving home where she would be treasured and taken care of. The problem was Anna had no faith in the child-care system as it pertained to unwanted or unidentified children. By the time the decision to allow adoption was ground out by the slow wheels of justice and the process of screening prospective parents had been crawled through, Helena would have been in foster limbo for months and months, maybe years. By then what sparked pure and beautiful in this little river nymph might be dead.

"You're sure keeping Helena today won't interfere with any of your plans?" Anna asked.

"I have no plans and today is Freddy's lieu day. I hope he will stay home but I think he is going to talk himself into unemployment instead."

The comment was sufficiently cryptic Anna might have pursued the meaning on another day. This morning she was too distracted to bother.

Driving out in the clear light of a desert morning the macabre signs of skeletal children in ball caps enjoying various sports was as charming as Anna had known it should have been the previous night. The ghost town, with its casual and comfortable mix of the dead and the living, decadence and growth, and the idiosyncratic lunacy of people at the end of the line-those who wash up on the sh.o.r.es of Caribbean islands, ski slopes and other destinations most of humanity chooses only to visit. Paradise doesn't work as a steady diet and those who remain there are tough and, as Carmen said, the goods are odd.

Anna loved the intrinsic art in the psychedu ingooelically painted trailer-c.u.m-ramada that sold cold beer, the lot where a long-departed entrepreneur had put a life-sized pirate ship in hopes of luring tourist dollars, but mostly she loved leaving Terlingua and heading into the open s.p.a.ces of the park.

Pushing b.u.t.tons, Anna lowered all four windows and let the dry, fragrant air blast the confines of the Martinezes' home from her mind, the smell of talc.u.m powder and formula from her nose. Freedom blasted in on the desert wind and she realized it was the first time she'd been free in a long, long time. District rangers were tied to their radios, wives to their husbands, mothers-or caregivers-to their charges, farmers to their fields. Where one loved one was tied. Responsibility for the welfare of others was an anchor and chain.

Once she wanted to sever those ties and walk deep into the backcountry where she owed allegiance to no one. That hadn't been her wish for many years, certainly not since she'd fallen in love with Paul. Still it was good to leave the fetters of the heart behind now and then.

This Eden, like those she'd been contemplating on the drive through Terlingua, wasn't a place she could do more than visit. The closer she came to the Chisos Mountains, a ring of peaks, an entire circular mountain range marooned in a sea of desert, the more heavily thoughts of Cyril and Steve and even Chrissie weighed on her mind.

They'd probably left and were headed for the safety and warmth of their parents' homes by now, but she hoped not. Human nature was geared to escape from pain, run from danger, but she'd noticed over time that those who stayed close enough so they could work through the trauma with others who had survived it with them healed more swiftly and more completely. The bond formed under duress was allowed to hold them together in mutual understanding till they got a little more of their psychic strength back. Scooping up the survivors and shipping them to different destinations isolated them.

Though people would deny it, adventure was a high. If there wasn't anyone who had shared the feeling it was easy to believe the event had turned one into a monster.

Lost in her thoughts, Anna had been driving blind for thirty minutes. The entrance to the campground in Chisos Basin whipping by her pa.s.senger side window brought her out of her brown study.

Using the lodge parking lot to turn around, she headed back the short distance to the campsites. Awake now and paying attention, she noticed a black SUV pulling out of a parking s.p.a.ce behind her. It stayed in her rearview mirror, following too close for comfort as she drove down the gentle incline from the lot to the turnoff. As she clicked on her turn signal the SUV did the same. Then it started honking its horn and flashing its lights.

"What now?" she muttered, and pulled to the side of the road. Before the SUV had made a full stop behind the Honda, Anna was out of the car.

The SUV, hulking like a great shiny dung beetle on the gray and tan landscape, hummed secretively for a moment, the life behind its tinted windows invisible to those outside. Then the driver's door opened and the heavyset guy who'd been in the conference room, the one who knew how to hiu kn tide in plain sight and fetched soda pop for the mayor of Houston, climbed out. Moving stiffly he uttered a little "ugh" as his weight shifted from the seat of his pants to the soles of his shoes. Anna couldn't tell if he was as stove up as he was acting or if it was just that, acting.

Leaning back against the car door, she crossed her arms over her chest and her legs at the ankles. The sun on her face felt like a sacrament.

"Anna Pigeon, isn't it?"

"It is. Darden White."

"That would be me."

Anna watched the mayor's security chief shake out the stiffness and walk toward her. Right off she'd kind of identified with this guy for reasons she hadn't a clue about. White struck a chord that sounded of old and better days. Probably precisely the chord he wanted to strike.

"You saved an old man a trip down the hill."

Now Anna was sure it was an act. "That shtick ever work for you?" she asked pleasantly.

White started a bit but then he smiled. "It does," he said. "It can backfire on you but I've gotten some good use out of it. And lately there've been times I wasn't sure where the act left off and old age began. Won't work for you, though. It's gender-specific."

"Women don't need it," Anna said, answering his smile. "We get underestimated without even half trying."

"Not by me you don't." He sounded almost grim. "The phones being what they are, I was going to drive down to Ranger Martinez's place on the off chance you'd be in. The mayor wants to see you."

It sounded more like an order than an invitation. From what Anna had noted about Mayor Pierson the previous evening, she wasn't a woman who took kindly to those who said no to her. "What does the mayor of Houston want to see little old me about?" Anna asked. Darden White stepped between her and the sun, providing shade for her. He thought he was doing her a favor.

"You'd have to ask the mayor that," Darden said.

Anna liked that he didn't say he didn't know what it was she wanted. Choosing not to lie to her was respectful. She returned the courtesy by not pushing him to tell her what the unexpected summons meant.

"Sure," she said. Judith had rubbed Anna the wrong way. She doubted the two of them would become fast friends. But she found the woman interesting. More to the point, she found the mayor's avid interest in what had happened to the woman in the river interesting.

"I want to check on the rest of our ill-fated rafters, then I'll come on up. The lodge dining room suit her? I haven't had breakfast."

"She was hoping you'd come to her cabin." "After breakfast," Anna said, and pushed away from the Honda to let White know the chat was at an end.

"Mind if I join you for breakfast? I could do with a bite myself."

"Give me about an hour."

Darden turned smartly and walked smoothly back to the SUV, his spine straight, his shoulders square.

He's showing off, Anna thought.

White stopped before he opened the door to his vehicle and threw her a mocking smile to let her know he was showing off and they both knew it.

Anna laughed and waved. Breakfast would be good. Anna wanted to know what in the h.e.l.l he and his little blond mayor were up to.

TWENTY-SIX.

An hour. That would give him time to check on Judith. When she'd sent him down the mountain to invite Anna Pigeon to lunch, her RPMs were getting close to the point her engine was about to start screaming. Or freeze up. He'd never seen her so strung out. He'd been with her through a lot of political battles; the underhanded backstabbing world of politics didn't tax her nerves, it exhilarated her. Domestic traumas were the ones that got to her little girl's heart and she often reacted like a kid, Darden mused. Wild and emotional and not always completely rational.

This was a rotten time for Judith to go to pieces, Darden thought. There were too many plates in the air. Darden felt like the guy on Ed Sullivan who had to run from pole to pole to pole keeping the darn things spinning so the whole mess wouldn't crash to the floor and shatter.

Judith had been upset by the news of the woman found in the strainer. That didn't surprise Darden; he hadn't much liked it either. She was concerned about the baby the Pigeon woman had saved. Darden thought about that for a while.

He didn't know much about babies-didn't know anything about babies, if the truth be told. They were an uninteresting mystery to him but he'd seen enough sane women and a few sane men lose their minds over the little things to know they were powerful magic.

Charles had wanted kids. To carry on the Pierson name, no doubt, Darden thought sourly. To give the guy some credit, he did like kids. His sister had three and he doted on them. Judith had nixed that idea shortly after the wedding. Kids and political ambition didn't mix and she'd known what she wanted. Now that she was in her forties, had her biological clock kicked in? She hadn't said as much to Darden but then that wasn't the sort of thing they talked about. Thank G.o.d.

Did she have an idea of using that baby to further her career? That might make sense, in a warped kind of way. He could see her, looking every inch the concerned maternal woman, holding the golden-skinned child up as an example of the evils of a porous border.

He shook his head and smiled as he eased the big SUV around the parking lot and headed up the narrow back road to the cabins. Judith was the one to sell it. The kid s.n.a.t.c.hed from the Rio Grande by the mayor of Houston would make a fine emotional appeal and soften the hard edges that could turn off women voters and bleeding-heart liberals.

Darden didn't want any part of that scenario but it was better than some he could imagine. At least the little b.u.g.g.e.r would get a good home. That is, if it was a little Mexican baby and if its mother was trying to cross to the promised land and instead went to the Promised Land.

That speculation was one Darden had been studiously avoiding. He was trained in obedience and loyalty. It suited him to follow; he'd known it since he was a youngster. Men like him were born to be soldiers in somebody's army, to give their lives for somebody's flag. Whose flag was an accident of birth. Born in the U.S.A., Darden had followed the stars and stripes and was loyal to the commander in chief, whoever he was and whatever he believed in. When he retired he'd shifted that allegiance to the mayor of Houston.

Worry about right and wrong wasn't a concept he embraced. Right and wrong were ephemerals; they changed from every angle, from hour to hour, depending on which side of any of a thousand borders a soldier was born.

The armor of blind loyalty that he'd worn so comfortably for so long was beginning to show cracks. The corpse in the river, the baby sliced out with a priest's pocketknife. How biblical was that? Anna should have put the kid in a basket made of those great big reeds that were taking over and floated it to the nearest pharaoh.

That whole mess crawled under Darden's protective skin. The coincidence of it happening now and here and in that way was hard to swallow but if he didn't swallow it he was obliged to check on it. Swallowing the truth that might uncover would be worse; it would be swallowing hemlock as far as he was concerned.

A man loomed into the periphery of his daydream and he cursed himself for a fool. He'd never used to have problems concentrating, observing his surroundings clearly. Maybe a little hemlock was just what the doctor ordered.

The loomer was Gordon. Heavy with the thoughts he'd been entertaining, Darden stopped the SUV and lowered the tinted window. "Hey, Gordon," he said. "I've got a job for you. And take your buddy Kevin with you. He's been getting on the mayor's nerves."

Dispatching his agents made him feel both better and worse but it also allowed him to shelve the speculation for a while. At least until he had hard information.

A s.p.a.cE HAD Opened up nearest the stone stairs to the cabins; he parked the SUV and stepped out. For a moment the peace of the Chisos Basin swept away the turmoil in his mind. Rain had washed the air so clean it nearly sparkled. Each twig and branch of the pines glistened and the intoxicating smell of pine and sage and sunlight eased the wrinkles from his gray matter. It was so close to narcotic he stood and breathed for a minute, the need to e, ng hurry and fix, abort, dissuade, dissemble washed from him for that brief time.

Maybe when he retired and his mom died, he would buy a cabin in the mountains, grow his beard out and become a hippie. He'd missed the whole free-love, tune-in, turn-on, drop-out business when he was in college. Revisiting it in his so-called golden years might be entertaining.

Probably not, he thought as he shook off the joy of the day; he'd been born in a city and he would die in a city. The pulse of the life of the human hive was as necessary to him as the pulse of his own heartbeat.

Comfortably shouldering the weight of his world once again, he started up the walk. He heard the hissing when he was still fifteen feet from the shared porch. It evolved into words as he stepped under the overhang.

"Keep your voice down!" A stage whisper carried through the open screened window of Judith and Charles's cabin. "I will not have a scene. I will not."

"My voice is down," Charles said in a conversational tone. He didn't sound angry, just tired. "Don't fight this, Judith. If you do, I promise you I will make a scene that will bring your whole house of cards down around your ears."

"Please wait. You don't have to make a decision now, do you? Please wait awhile." Judith no longer hissed like an angry snake. The change was painful to Darden's ears. She was begging, a lost little girl begging for her life. G.o.d but he hated to hear that. When her mother had finally walked away for good, abandoning her seven-year-old daughter to the care of the babysitter, Judy had pleaded in that way, so tiny and afraid. Hearing it from the grown woman brought back the pain and helplessness Darden had felt as a young man trying to soothe a brokenhearted little girl.

d.a.m.n Charles.

Usually, when Judith and Charles fought, Darden made himself scarce. What went on in the marital arena was none of his business and he liked it that way. It was when it was out of the arena that he stepped in. Given there was so much at stake and he was the man who was going to have to put Humpty Dumpty back together again after the fall, he sat down quietly in one of the plastic armchairs outside his cabin, no more than five feet from their door, and listened.

"I've waited long enough, Judith. You've got what you wanted. You're a big wheel, the mayor of Houston. I'm sorry if that's not enough for you, but I'm through putting my life on hold while you conquer the world. It's a done deal. I saw to it before we left Houston."