Deep South (3 page)

Too tired for adventures, she chose the known and allowed Taco to drag her toward the campground. Rocky Springs camp was laid out in a loop. A narrow asphalt road circled a wooded area several acres in size. Camps, cleared areas with grills and picnic tables, were located on both sides of the road. Two brick buildings housing toilets sufficed for the amenities. Though it was a medium-sized campground by NPS standards, the crush of trees made it seem intimate.

Incognito in civilian clothes, with Taco for cover, she wandered unimpeded past several RVS and a small silver Airstream with Michigan plates. Campers were quiet at this hour, sleeping or standing dully over wood fires, coffee cups clasped reverently to their bosoms. Birds, none of which Anna could see in the dense canopy of leaves, discussed the situation in hushed warblings.

Feeling mildly rebellious, she let Taco off his leash. The retriever loped off to a deserted campsite and stuck his nose into something she was sure she didn't want to know about. Enjoying not being in an automobile and not traveling any faster than the gods intended, she continued on without him.

Near the top of the loop, where the road curved to the left out of sight, a strange phenomenon brought her out of the meditative state. In the shallow ditch between the asphalt and the inner circle of camps, a stone the size of a large cantaloupe was moving, bobbing as if it rode atop bubbling waters.

Thinking again about the need to get her eyes examined, she left the road for the mowed grass on the shoulder. After she had walked a yard or two, the rock resolved itself into a more logical form.

An armadillo was rooting through the grass in search of its breakfast.

No stranger to these marvelous beasts, Anna bad seen them in the Guadalupe Mountains, where she'd been a ranger once upon a time. On the Trans Pecos, they were fondly referred to as "Texas speed bumps." There was even a Joke made for them: Why did the chicken cross the road? To show the armadillo it could be done. The animals were slow, nearsighted and not terribly bright. The armor they'd evolved to defend themselves was no match for speeding automobiles.

This was the first one Anna could remember seeing alive.

An old alcoholic's tale said that, when sneaked up on and surprised, the compact little animals would jump straight up, sometimes as much as four feet. Having nothing she'd rather do, Anna decided to see if it was true.

Careful to stay directly behind the creature and to walk as quietly as she could-she'd never heard armadillos had keen hearing but this one had big cars and nature was usually a practical mother-she followed the animal in its single-minded grub seeking. Inch by inch she closed the gap between them. Her plan was simple, as befitted the gravity of the experiment and the fogged state of her intellect. When close enough, she would lunge, grab its tall, yell "Jump!" and see if it compiled.

There is no Zen like the Zen of the predator. The world narrowed to the scope of the hunt. By the time the armadillo had nosed and waddled around the bend in the road, Anna was less than thirty-six inches from the gray and scaly hindquarters. She'd geared herself for the leap into scientific discovery when a voice blasted into her consciousness.

"Them's not very good catin'." The world shifted and Anna found herself back in the big picture.

Finally wised-up, her armadillo scuttled ahead, winning back the ten yards Anna had so cunningly eaten up. Disappointment turned to irritation in the time it took her to turn her head toward the interrupter, and irritation vanished in amazement in the blink of an eye.

The man who had frightened away her beastle was a Confederate soldier: his crumpled gray cap looked as if it had seen more than one campaign, and his gray button-front trousers, worn and sweat-stained, were held up by suspenders, the trouser legs stuffed into battered black boots. The hallucination didn't stop with the soldier. Behind him, two tents, old and made of canvas, were pitched around a central fire, where a couple more soldiers, sleeves rolled to greet the coming heat, a day's growth of beard darkening their chins, drank coffee out of tin parmikins. One wore a saber at his belt. Three rifles, manufactured early in the nineteenth century but clean and oiled, leaned against an old wooden tucker box. Above the tents flew a Confederate flag, and a smaller flag, white with a red bar along one side, a blue canton with a white star and what looked like a magnolia tree. "Wboa," Anna said. "You wanting a little breakfast?" the soldier asked politely. He drawled. Not the tobacco-juice sort of draw] Anna'd heard when Daddy and Baby talked, but a genteel, Rhett Butler kind of a drawl that was in keeping with the captain's insignia on his cap. "No," Anna managed.

"I was..." Suddenly her experiment seemed too hard to explain to an army man of any stripe. Or era. "I was just watching him. I wasn't going to cat him." The soldier looked at her long and hard. "You're not from around here, are you, girl?"

"Not really," Anna admitted. Taco appeared from the woods to slobber on her thigh. "Hunter?" This time Anna was prepared. "Just an overgrown lap dog."

"Let us give you a cup of coffee?" Anna followed him into the Civil War and was treated to good coffee in a tin cup that burned her bands. Her costumed campers were reenactors. She'd heard the term now and again but had never appreciated the scope or the enthusiasm with which the hobby was pursued. In fact the word "bobby" was met with polite outrage, as if she'd suggested to an Orthodox Jew that reading the Torah was a nice pastime.

The soldier who had ended her game with the armadillo was Jimmy Williams, a tax lawyer with a firm in Jackson. The other two referred to him as Captain Williams or "Cap." His lieutenants-this camp was conspicuously devoid of privates-were Ian McIntire, a Honda salesman from Pearl, and Leo Fullerton, a Baptist minister from Port Gibson.

Captain Williams suited the role of a soldier: lean and stronglooking with thick brown hair just beginning to show a salting of ago. Though Anna put him at around fifty, his youthful body, married to a face creased with the kind of wrinkles only the sun can scour into flesh, gave him an ageless look. The Honda salesman was a different story.

Ian McIntire would look more at home in a suit, preferably seersucker, and a tie. Probably of an age with Jimmy Williams, he had hair that was white, cut short and bristling like frost in the morning sun. jovial- it oozed from him. His belly was round, his face oval and fleshy, his eyes bright St. Nick blue and his smile boyish. When he laughed, and that was often, the laughter was high-pitched yet pleasant. The kind of laugh actors love; one so infectious others must laugh along with it.

Reverend Leo Fullerton was the youngest, midthirties at a guess.

Dark hair, low over deep-set eyes, and a wide mouth set above a long chin lent his face a crushed and cruel aspect. His left eye was crossed and it was hard to tell where he was looking. But for a bit of a paunch, he was a powerfully built man.

A ludicrous assortment for Civil War soldiers, Anna thought. Then it came home to her that soldiers in every civil war were just merchants and boys, thieves and laborers, husbands and bankers.

While Ian brought her a three-legged stool, the captain insisted she take a doughnut, fried that morning and liberally dusted with powdered sugar. Southern hospitalltv evidently was not a myth. The lieutenant reverend was the only member of the group who was standoffish, but it seemed due more to natural shyness than any malice.

With the unselfconscious delight of boys, they told her the history of the Jeff Davis Avengers, a ragtag company of rebels formed in Port Gibson near the end of the war, when Grant was wringing the last drop of resistance from a besieged Vicksburg. Begrudgingly, they admitted there were no records of the Avengers ever doing battle, but to a man, they were absolutely convinced those long-dead civilian soldiers of Port Gibson had been instrumental in the war.

"Covert Ops" popped into Anna's bead, but she knew she couldn't say it with a straight face. Out of deference to this singular passion of her bosts, she kept her mouth shut.

Each item in camp was lovingly described: the iron skillets, the cooking tripod, the rifles. The good reverend must have had the strongest curatorial instincts of the three. When conversation moved to artifacts that they, as re-enactors, were breathing new life into, he became animated. It was a mildly alarming transformation. His slash mouth, too wide for his teeth, giving them a spiky feral aspect, might have come across as excited in another man but had a manic feel when manifest by the preacher.

"These things aren't just old stuff, junk," Leo said as he brought one of the rifles over to where Anna sat. "These are the actual weapons those boys carried. They were bought new by somebody's daddy or uncle." He pulled open the breach and looked to see if the rifle was loaded.

"They were used for squirrel, deer, bear. Put food on the table. Then along comes the war and these boys stand to lose everything. I mean everything-not just a little blood and time like the North. A way of life, everything they stood for, believed, everything they owned. So out comes the squirrel gun and they go out knowing they'll be shooting boys like themselves." He was standing too close, towering. The rifle was at eye level to Anna, deadly wood and metal bulk held in the blunt hands of an excited stranger. Anna's skull bones began to feel fragile.

Evincing a sudden need to stretch, she stood and put some distance between herself and this son of the Confederacy.

As Leo Fullerton had been revving up, Ian and Jimmy bad been growing twitchy. A strained look passed between them, and Captain Williams tossed half a cup of coffee he'd lust poured for himself into the campfire as if trying to interrupt the preacher's How.

Maybe Fullerton was prone to psychotic breaks when faced with modern-day Yankees in his Civil War ideal. Anna'd heard somewhere that the South didn't lock up the insane, but integrated them into the fabric of everyday society. "You'd think there'd be more pieces left," Leo said.

"But not pristine, not like this. This came with its own history. This was a Union soldier's weapon till I got it.

A fella from Connecticut fought right here. Right here," he reiterated.

Williams had begun shifting his weight from foot to foot, like a man who wanted to pace, to stalk, but wasn't letting himself.

Trained to watch hands when uncomfortable with her fellow men, Anna noted his fingers were flicking occasionally: aborted movements, as if be restrained himself from reaching out to grab somebody.

Reverend Fullerton aimed the rifle at an imaginary foe, and the captain laughed, loud and hollow, the stage laugh of a bad actor.

"Easy there, Leo. The lady doesn't want to watch you win back the South." Williams stepped around the campfire and clapped Fullerton on the back with a little too much force for mere conviviality.

"Are you interested in history?" Leo Fullerton asked Anna in the manner that lets one know a reply in the negative will be construed as proof of idiocy.

She was saved from answering by Ian. "What brings you to these parts?" He forced a change of subject. "Down for the pilgrimage?" Other than Mecca, Anna wasn't aware of much in the pilgrim line.

"I'm the new district ranger on this part of the Trace," she told them.

Abruptly the weather changed, a cold wind blew down from the northward of their opinion. Like comic thieves caught suddenly when the lights are switched on, the three of them froze in tableau.

Anna got a whole lot wearier. "Taco," she hollered and the dog rose obligingly from where he'd flopped in front of one of the tents.

"I'd better get to my unpacking. Thanks for the coffee." The psychic equivalent of a nudge passed through the faux soldiers, and they came back to life, Anna departed in a flurry of "Sure you won't have another cuppa,"

"A lady ranger, huh?" and "Welcome to Mississippi. "The tone was too cheery, covering up forbad manners.

Or something else she was totally in the dark about.

She took the shortest route back to the road between two Dodge Ram pickup trucks. Plastered on the bumper of one of them was the familiar shape of the rebel flag, Across it was written: HERITAGE, NOT HATE.

As she and Taco walked across the apron of well-worn grass to the asphalt road, a small utility vehicle, a sort of glorified golf cart with the forest-green stripe of the National Park Service on its side, puttered around the bend. "Frank, meet your new boss," Ian McIntire hollered, and trotted down the gentle incline to wave the machine and its pilot over. Normalcy had returned, The Civil War re-enactors were again at case. Anna didn't know if they'd quickly acclimatized to the appalling phenomenon of a female district ranger or, and this grated on her overtaxed nerves, decided a lady cop was bound to be sufficiently inept that whatever bad struck them dumb at the mention of her avocation was considered safe once again.

A wiry man pushing sixty, Frank had thick red hair devoid of so much as a spattering of gray. He climbed out of the car wearing the familiar relaxed green and gray of an NPS maintenance uniform. The inside of both arms from elbow to wrist were crosshatched with deep scars, as if he'd held onto a bobcat who did not wish to be held onto.

Anna introduced herself, and Frank shook bands gingerly. "So you're it," be said as he pulled off his green ball cap and mopped sweat from his face and neck with a wad of paper towels he'd stashed in his hip pocket.

"You sure got your work cut out for you. I'm not saying anything against anybody, but there hasn't been a whole beck of a lot done around here for a month of Sundays."