Borderline: A Novel Part 5

"Anna."

She knew if she looked up, he'd never leave off until he'd gotten all of them to a safer place than a stone aerie in a lightning storm. "Done," she said. "You got that rope tied around the blade end?" she asked Steve.

"Done," he said.

"Cyril, bring the oar, handle-first."

"Let me," Chrissie said.

"This isn't the time for improvising, Chris," Steve said.

"You just want to have all the fun. Don't be such a bore."

"Som C sin'tebody bring me the d.a.m.ned oar," Anna said firmly.

"Thank you," she heard Chrissie sniff. Lightning cracked again. Chrissie screamed and the oar handle slammed against the side of Anna's face. It bounced off, struck Easter between her wildly rolling eyes and the cow began to fight with the last reserves of her strength, flailing with hooves and horns, trying to get to her feet.

Anna leapt backward to avoid the horns. Her right foot landed on wet rock. Her left hit nothing but air and she felt herself falling.

SEVEN.

The dinner had gone well, Darden thought. Judith never ceased to amaze him. Given her husband's latest stunt, her insides had to be boiling like a nest of fire ants somebody stepped on. No one would have known it to look at her. Every hair was in place, not a sign of the streaked makeup and reddened eyes with which he'd been met. Cool: that was the word for Judith. Cool and fiery, a terrific combination for a politician. The dullest const.i.tuent felt her pa.s.sion but the sharpest never felt that she was not in control.

For reasons Darden could never fathom, people tended to think her pa.s.sion was their pa.s.sion, that she was eager to fight for their cause. She was their Joan of Arc, ready to lead their army to victory. Unlike Saint Joan, Judith was entirely sane. She would burn on the cross for n.o.body.

The SUV jolted over a deep rut, throwing Darden so hard against his seat belt that he grunted and swore. Big Bend was made of dust. He'd eaten dust over its unpaved roads for so many hours that even in the air-conditioned cab with the windows tightly closed he could feel it settling in the lines around his eyes and crusting in his nose.

"Psychosomatic," he told himself. He hated dirt. Wearing the same shirt two days in a row made his skin crawl. He couldn't see how men tolerated facial hair. One of the agents he'd worked with when he was in D.C. sported a handlebar mustache, a "soup strainer," it was called. During training Darden had to sit beside him in the cafeteria because if he sat across from the guy and had to look at the food hanging up on the hairs under his nose he'd throw up.

Another jolt hammered up from the road and he slowed the vehicle to alleviate the beating he was taking.

He didn't like to think he'd always been so fastidious.

In college he hadn't gone the hippie route but he'd had long hair and didn't remember being too particular about where he slept or with whom or what he picked up off the floor to wear the next day. His mother used to nag him about cleaning his room and he remembered Judith wrinkling her little snub nose and saying "pee-euww" when he took off his running shoes after track practice.

As a kid Judith was so honest, it was a wonder somebody didn't wring her neck. She didn't grasp the fact that just because it was true didn't mean you could announce it to the world.

"She must weigh a ton," she'd s Fv> She never deluded herself either. Even as a little girl she knew her strengths and weaknesses and spoke of them openly. A warped world saw that as boasting or having a poor self-image. Judith saw it as inventory. She couldn't understand why other people hated honesty. Once she had crawled into his lap when he was watching a football game on television, crying because she'd been chewed out by the woman across the street who didn't enjoy discussing the fact that her hair was thinning so much her scalp shined through like a pink baby's bottom. Judith turned her face into his shoulder, getting kid snot all over his T-shirt, and wailed: "If n.o.body tells them, how can they fix it? I want to fix everything stupid about me."

By first grade she'd figured it out. She still took her own and everyone else's measure, but she kept it to herself. It was one of the things that made her such a formidable opponent. Judith believed all criticism was constructive. She pored over reviews and blogs that ranted against her. If the criticism was incorrect, she'd figure out what she could do to be clearer in her intentions. If it was correct, she'd figure out how to sh.o.r.e up her defenses so the flaw, should she choose to keep it for business or personal reasons, would go unnoticed. And if it was spurious, she said it told her a lot about the mental workings of the critic. Nothing was wasted. Praise, on the other hand, she thought was worthless to receive but good as gold to give-and a whole lot cheaper.

"People will wag themselves to death for a little pat on the head," she'd say.

Thinking of the snotty-nosed little girl burrowing into his shoulder, Darden guessed he couldn't have been a clean freak back then. That was comforting. He hated to think he'd become Felix Unger before he was old enough to vote. It was bad enough now-maybe it was worse now: he cooked for a hobby, lived with his mother, and got the w.i.l.l.i.e.s if he got mayonnaise on his shirt cuff.

Maybe he'd done so much dirty work in his career he had to root it out of his personal life to feel clean.

When he'd taken over security for Judith, she was deputy mayor of Houston, not exactly the number one target of the uglies. As mayor the stakes went up a little, but not much. a.s.sa.s.sins were too expensive to use for taking out local politicians. But Judith was a shooting star. She hadn't quite pulled an Obama and catapulted onto the national stage with a single speech, but she'd gone from Junior League team leader to mayor of one of the biggest, richest cities in America in eleven years. Eleven more and she would be on the national stage, Darden didn't doubt that. Security for a rising politico wasn't so much about keeping them alive as it was about keeping their political life alive.

The dirty work came in tidying up messes they left behind or sweeping the manure out of their path ahead.

"Hallelujah," Darden said. Paved road. Relieved of the b.u.mping and dusting, he loosened his seat belt and lowered the side window a couple of inches. The day was cool and overcast and he could smell that it was raining nearby. The olfactory sense was an unsung hero as far as Darden was concerned. People put so much en Kputll ergy into what they could see and hear and taste, they missed out on a whole universe waiting to be sniffed.

Darden smelled a rat in this last turn with Charles. It was too perfectly timed to have been an accident. Not for the first time, Darden thought about surgically removing Charles from Judith's life. Judith would make a beautiful widow. Voters would love the strong, grieving woman in subdued colors continuing to serve the public. Once widowed, those still pretending divorce was shocking would forget about her first husband. n.o.body dared admitting to disliking widows or orphans.

Charles would be easy to kill-everybody was easy to kill-but attacking a high-profile public figure's spouse never went as well as the doers thought it would. The husband of a powerful woman dies, a lot of people figure she did it no matter what the facts said. Especially if the husband had been a philanderer. Careful as Charles'd been and as much of Judith's money as he'd spent, Darden didn't kid himself that an enterprising investigative reporter couldn't dig up evidence of Mr. Charles Pierson's dalliances.

If the press didn't point the finger at the widow, it would still backfire. People wanted to bring a woman who lost her husband to violence a ca.s.serole and pat her on the back saying, "There, there." They didn't want to vote for her.

His cell phone vibrated and he plucked it out of his shirt pocket. Down on the desert floor, free of the Chisos Mountains that ringed the lodge, there was service. The call was from the home where his mother stayed when he was out of town. Maybe the poor old bird had fallen and was on her deathbed. He wasn't sure if he'd be heart-broken or relieved.

He flipped open the phone. "Darden White speaking." The woman on duty told him his mom was agitated and wanted to speak with him. "Put her on," he said.

Calls from his mom entailed a dark tunnel down which long conversations trickled as the caregiver reminded Ellen she wanted to speak with her son and helped her to figure out how the phone worked and where to put it against her head. When he figured the receiver was in the vicinity of his mother's ear, he said: "Hey, Mama, what's happening?"

"Oh, Darden! How nice of you to call."

"Just wondering how you were doing, is all." Darden no longer corrected his mother when she forgot. He didn't explain how life worked either. That was a rabbit hole he'd gone down a few times when she'd first started losing it. "You doing okay, Mama?"

"No," she said. Murmuring at the far end of the tunnel ensued as confusion erupted and caregivers gave care.

The sign for Panther Junction, where the park had its headquarters, slid by on his left. The clock on the dash read 4:45. Judith wanted him on hand for the big announcement at a c.o.c.ktail party she was hosting in the dining room that evening. He should be back in the Chisos Basin in plenty of time. He never exceeded the speed limit in parks. Rangers were a funny bunch. They didn't care for the brotherhood in blue. They wouldn't let him off with a wink and a nod. In fact, they might take a special pleasure in writing a tick Kwrioodet to another cop. After all, law enforcement should set a good example.

Quaint, but charming.

The rain had caught up with him and was beading up on the windshield and making muddy pocks in the dust on the hood. Black was a lousy color for a car in the desert. It was like wearing black knit around yellow cats.

"Darden?"

She was back.

"I'm here, Mama."

"I can't take being locked in this . . . this . . . h.e.l.lhole."

Being held prisoner was the worst part of it for his mom. On bad days she banged doors and pounded. What amazed him was that she stopped there. A year ago, before she'd stepped off that cliff, she would have picked up a chair and smashed a window, then hailed a cab.

"I'm sorry, Mama."

"It sucks," she said flatly.

Darden laughed. "Watch out, Mama, they'll wash your mouth out with soap. I worry when I'm not home. Could you stick it out a day or two? I'd sure appreciate it."

"A day or two." Either she hung up or walked away from the phone or he'd gone out of range.

His mom didn't think she was going insane, she thought the world was. Normal activities were unutterably confusing, people strange and arbitrary.

In the wild and woolly sixties, Darden had done drugs. He'd done them exactly one time. For no good reason he'd taken a hit of LSD at a party. His mental s.h.i.t hit the fan. It had taken him months to screw his head back on the right way. One of his roommates took the stuff every weekend and seemed no worse off for it, but it hit in Darden's skull like a grenade.

For a year or so afterward he had nightmares that he'd gone over the edge and he was being locked up in a nuthouse. Watching his mom was bringing that nightmare back.

"Poor old bird," he said, and turned the radio on loud.

Charles was waiting for him when he reached his cabin, sitting on the veranda in one of the plastic chairs. The rain was coming down, not hard but steady, and damp had been added to the gritty feel of his skin.

Gritty and sticky and Charles.

Before Judith had married Charles, Darden had abused his position with the Service to find out all there was to know about him.

Charles Pierson was forty-nine years old. He'd graduated from Georgetown University and gone on to graduate school in Oxford-"England, not K-"E wa Mississippi," as he was fond of saying. Six months into his first year Charles fell in love with a professor eleven years his senior. From the first photographs Darden had seen of Charles's inamorata, she wasn't the usual sort to drive boys wild.

But then morgue shots didn't show people in their best light.

"Mr. Pierson," he said evenly. "Ready for the big announcement?"

EIGHT.

Anna tried to change her trajectory but couldn't. She flung out her arms in an attempt to regain balance that had ceased to exist. A strong hand caught her wrist and yanked her back onto the ledge.

"That was scary," Anna said to Carmen. The guide still had her wrist in a grip of iron. Anna didn't mind.

"Scary," Carmen echoed.

A gust of a sigh cut through the sound of falling rain and whispering river. Anna's eyes cleared of the broken b.l.o.o.d.y death she'd glimpsed at the bottom of the cliff and she looked over at her husband. Paul was spread-eagled on the now quiescent cow. Both looked at her with wide, frightened eyes. The fear in Paul's cleared, wiped away by a glaze of anguish, and Anna knew he had seen the death as well. Before she'd registered the thought, it, too, was gone.

"I think that was Easter's last gasp," Paul said. "Either we lower her now or leave her. She's so worn down from starvation I doubt she'd make it past the first coyote even if we did get her out safely. Let her go to her greener pastures here, is my vote."

The rain was settling into a steady beat. Carmen looked at the cow, then the river. "Leave her," she said. "She's low enough now she might get down on her own." That wasn't true and they all knew it, but it was a nice lie on which to abandon the cow.

Anna needed to save something, prove there was a hope of avoiding at least one miserable death, but not at the risk of endangering seven others. If the rain was not localized, if it was raining this heavily in the mountains of Mexico, the river was going to get more exciting than they'd bargained for.

"I'm afraid you're on your own, Easter," she said, and knelt to take the tethers off the cow's ankles where they'd been left when Easter put up her final fight.

"No. We're almost there. It won't take any longer to lower her than it will to untie her," Cyril said.

"It will," Carmen replied. "And getting her settled on the raft will take longer than that."

"I can't leave her," Cyril said. There wasn't any anger or disrespect in Cyril's tone. She wasn't making a play for power or voicing a threat. She sounded as if she was stating a frightening, inexplicable fact of life.

Anna looked to her brother, Steven, who shr Nv hugged. "Three days," he said. "And that was for a cat."

"Paul?" Anna turned to her husband. After nearly widowing him two minutes before, she was acutely aware of his feelings.

"Chrissie, why don't you go down and start packing up the chairs," Paul said. He was getting rid of her and she knew it. For a moment she stared at him mutinously. He looked back, his face relaxed and kind and hopeful. Nothing to mutiny against. Chrissie gave up and started slowly back down the ledge.

"Are you okay with this?" he asked Carmen.

"Do we have a choice?" The three of them looked at the twins.

"I'm sorry," Cyril said sincerely.

"Like the Chinese say, if you save a life, you are then responsible for that life. Cyril, go down and get ready to receive your cow," Paul said. "Let's get the feet tied. Above the hocks and tight. Carmen, would you hold her head? We don't want a repeat of the last lightning strike."

Easter had no more fight in her. She lay quietly as they tied her hocks together and threaded the oar through. Having wrapped the ends of the lines around two boulders that looked as if they would stand till the millennium, Carmen and Anna on one line and Paul on the other, they braced themselves as Steve shoved the cow over the edge of the cliff. The belay went easily, the rain-induced slipperiness working in their favor, and Easter was gently lowered to the bottom of the escarpment.

"She's down," they heard Cyril shout.

Cyril untied the ropes from the cow's legs and they wound them back up for the descent. By the time they reached the bottom, Cyril had Easter up on her feet and was leading her toward the river, one hand on the cow's horn.

The picture of the lovely young woman leading the wretched old cow was such that Anna couldn't help being moved, and any trace of annoyance at Cyril for balking authority evaporated.

"Hey!" Carmen shouted, and began to run.

Lori and Chrissie had wandered up to the bottom of the cliff to watch the bovine events and left their posts at the raft. The river had risen and lifted it from the rocky sh.o.r.e. The stern wagged in the current like the tail of a living thing trying to break free of its moorings.

"d.a.m.n," Anna whispered, and she and Paul ran after the guide. They caught it just as the river was taking it for itself and hauled the raft up onto the sh.o.r.e. Lori and Chrissie had not bothered to tie the raft before they'd abandoned their posts. Nor had they packed up the chairs they'd taken out to lounge in.

Anna curbed her anger because Carmen had none. Maintaining safety and equipment was the charge of the guide, and Anna could tell she was mad only at herself for forgetting her primary responsibility in the adventure of saving the cow.

sheheight="1em"> Food boxes rearranged, Easter was toppled over onto the stern of the raft and lashed in place, her horns wrapped and duct-taped in towels to keep them from goring the rubber. The entire process took forty-two minutes. The river had risen half a foot in that time.

"Put on your life jackets," Carmen said, all traces of humor gone from her. "We're in for a wild ride. Once we're past the rockslide it will get easier."

Debris washed from the riverbanks upstream floated by at an alarming speed and the vacation/adventure cheers that had met the guide's first announcement of the rigors of the rapids were not repeated.

On the water, Anna felt a degree of relief. The rain, the cow and the rising Rio Grande had her nerves strung out. Moving made her feel as if they were making progress. The power of the river was a palpable thing, not only in the pull of the oar but in the muscular feel of the water as it swelled against the cliffs on either side, mounding against the rock, pushing over submerged stones with the oily grace of a giant serpent. Entering Santa Elena Canyon Anna had been struck with the force of the Rio Grande. That had been but a paltry thing, the river fed by rains pouring down the mountain streams from the Coahuilas was that slumbering beast roused to action, the sword that cut through solid rock and rolled house-sized boulders as if they were children's toys.

"We're going to beach the raft just around that big rock," Carmen said after they'd been on the water a quarter of an hour. "There's a good place there to scout out the rockslide."

Carmen shouted directions as they rounded the rock and even Lori and Chrissie followed them as best they could, their silliness ameliorated by fear. "Lighten up!" Anna called to them. "This is going to be fun." Cyril laughed but the other two girls looked as if their definition of fun did not include rain and rocks and rapids. Anna had seen too many tourists in the same state to hold it against them. The realization that, in the backcountry, an indifferent G.o.d is in control of one's life came as a shock to most people.

The strand of beach that Carmen used to scout the rapids was reduced to a ribbon under the coming water. They eased the raft to the back of this natural breakwater and beached it. Carmen led the six of them to the last bit of exposed land. From there they could see the beginning of the rockslide.

Enormous blocks of stone had tumbled from the cliffs above and scattered into the river, forming chutes and divides in the water as it found its way through. "A few things," Carmen said. "We want to stay in the center going in here. If we don't we can wrap the raft around a rock. The water can wrap one of these things around a boulder like you'd wrap Saran Wrap around an onion. Once the raft fills with water there's hardly any force on earth that can peel it back off the rock. If we get caught by the rock, it's not the end of the world. We lean into the rock to keep the upstream edge of the raft from getting flooded and we ease ourselves off. The rock is our friend. Hug it."

As she laid out the route they would take, Anna watched her traveling companions. Paul looked high: alert and keen, a half smile on his lips. Cyril and her S Cyoul brother were nervous but excited. Lori had the look of a terrified sheep. Lori was an abdicator, Anna guessed. The type that, under stress, abdicates responsibility for themselves and becomes childlike, expecting others to take care of them.