Ill Wind (11 page)

One of the many mysteries of Mesa Verde was that so few Anasazi burial sites were found. Some remains had been uncovered in sealed and abandoned rooms in the dwellings and some in the midden heaps below the cliff dwellings, but no burial ground had been discovered and surprisingly few individual sites for a society of near ten thousand souls that had flourished for more than five centuries.

Talk of the pipeline put Anna in mind of her housemate. “Al, Jamie was on duty in Cliff Palace when we had that medical this morning. Lately she’s been dropping heavy-handed hints that something’s going down on solstice. Is there anything I ought to know?”

Stinson threw back her head like Barbara Stanwyck in
Maverick Queen
and snorted a laugh. “The less law enforcement knows, the better I sleep nights.”

Anna laughed with her, partly at the sentiment and partly at a mental image of Al Stinson as Queen of the Cattle Thieves. Amid the merriment she found herself wondering if the maverick queen could swing a chain as well as a lariat.

“If you hear anything that sounds like it could get somebody hurt or fired, let me know and I’ll see if I can’t fulfill my role as Professional Party Pooper.”

“Better you than The Boys.”

 

 

BY the time Anna wandered into Administration it was after four P.M. and people were stirring to leave for the day. The receptionist’s desk was tidied and, engrossed in a phone conversation, she barely gave Anna a nod.

Anna fetched the procurement forms from the storage room in the basement. On her way back she stopped in the doorway of Patsy Silva’s office.

The superintendent’s secretary kept her office in a state of impressive order. Plants in macramé hangers, pictures, and a stained-glass image of Kokopelli, the flute player, in the window kept the orderliness from being oppressive.

“Hills could use your decorating service,” Anna said as she leaned against the door frame.

“Hills could use a bulldozer,” Patsy replied with a smile.

“How’s it going? I didn’t get a list of times and places for paternal visits so I just assumed you and Tom worked it out.”

Patsy turned away briefly, fussed with some papers. Anna tried to read the expression on her face but it was too fleeting.

“We’re doing okay,” Patsy said.

“Any more gifts of the weird persuasion?”

“Only this.” Patsy produced an extra bright smile as she held up her left wrist for inspection.

Anna whistled long and low. The watch Patsy wore was—or looked to be—fourteen-carat gold with at least a carat’s worth of diamonds sparkling around the face. Even with the union doing its fiscal magic, the watch must have cost Silva a month’s wages.

“Tom?”

Patsy nodded and Anna caught the expression again. This time she pegged it: embarrassment. Evidently it wasn’t all gifts Patsy took offense to. Only cheap ones.

“Good for you.” Anna glanced at her own Wal-Mart special. She’d managed to kill enough time. In six minutes she was off duty. The 10-343 had been effectively avoided for one day.

She called Stacy on the radio and he brought the patrol car to give her a lift to Far View. He still wore a haunted look and drove through the empty parking lot with the same hunched intensity as when weaving down a narrow road with lights and siren blaring.

“What happened to Bella?” Anna asked to make conversation.

“What do you mean?” Alarmed, Stacy lost his inward look. “Did something happen to Bella?”

“Drew was on the carry-out. Wasn’t he baby-sitting today? I just wondered where he’d stashed her.”

Visibly, he relaxed. “Bella stayed at the fire dorm watching cartoons with Jimmy. He called in sick. That’s all I need, for Bella to catch a dose of something.”

“Don’t worry. Unless she comes down with a case of Coors, Bella won’t get what Jimmy’s got.”

They rode without speaking till Stacy turned off Chapin Mesa Road toward the Far View dormitories. There was something familiar in the drawn face, the tight voice. Putting it together with the medical, Anna realized where she’d seen it before. He carried himself like a man in pain.

“Take off your gun and I’ll buy you a beer,” she offered on impulse.

For a moment she was sure he was going to turn her down. “I’ll get you home before six,” she added, remembering Bella and Drew’s baby-sitting schedule.

“A beer would taste good tonight.”

 

 

THE lounge at the Far View Lodge was on the second floor and boasted an open-air veranda to the east side. The view, though somewhat curtailed by an expanse of tarred roof studded with air-conditioning ducts, justified the name of Far View. Mesas receded into mists that melded seamlessly into mountain ranges. In the afternoon light, strong at midsummer, the muted blues and grays were given an iridescence that at some times made the mesas appear as unreal as an artist’s conception, and, at others, the only reality worth living.

When Anna arrived Stacy was not there. She took a table that backed on a low adobe wall. The plaster radiated heat collected during the day and deflected a cold wind that had sprung up.

Anna’s nerves jangled. She couldn’t shake an unwelcome First Date feeling. Possibly because she’d taken the time to comb her hair out of its braids and dab perfume between her breasts. A Carta Blanca took the edge off. By the time she was halfway down it, Stacy arrived.

The edge came back.

He looked as awkward as she felt, and wordlessly she cursed herself for moving their relationship out of the secure arena of work.

Stacy ordered a Moosehead and folded himself into one of the wire garden chairs.

“I hardly recognized you with your clothes on,” Anna said.

“Ah. Out of uniform.”

“You clean up nice.”

“Thanks.”

Small talk died. Anna sipped her beer and resisted the urge to glance at her watch. “I thought the medical went well this morning,” she said to get the conversation into neutral territory.

“God.” Stacy shook his head. Pain was clear in his eyes.

Anna forgot her discomfort. Leaning across the table, she took hold of his arm.

A familiar laugh brought her head up. Ted Greeley had taken a table across the veranda. As he caught her eye, he raised his highball in a salute. Anna smiled automatically then returned to Stacy. “What is getting to you?”

“Stephanie McFarland died. I called the ER before I came.”

Anna felt as if he’d slapped her. “That’s not right,” she said. “Stephanie was just a kid with asthma. They got the name wrong.”

Stacy shook his head. “The name wasn’t wrong. She died.”

“Fuck.” Anna took a long pull on the beer. It didn’t help. “Third grade. What the hell happened? She didn’t have to die.”

“Yes she did.”

Stacy sounded sure of himself, like a man quoting scripture or baseball scores.

“Why?” Anna demanded.

“Figure it out,” Stacy snapped. “You saw me. I couldn’t do a thing, not one damn thing.”

Anna looked at him for a long moment. Self-pity in the face of the child’s death struck her as blind arrogance. “Give it a rest. We did what we did. You were useless, not deadly. Don’t make yourself so important.”

Stacy stared at his hands. Clearly this was a cross he was determined to bear. Maybe he was Catholic.

“I’m sorry,” Anna said.

“Yeah. Me too. Sorrier than you know.”

Stacy made circles on the glass tabletop with the beer bottle.

Anna finished her beer and ordered another.

“Bella can get bone grafts in her legs,” he said, as if this were part of an ongoing conversation instead of a non sequitur . “She could dance, fall in love, marry, save the world—whatever she wanted.”

“Does Bella want the operations?” Anna asked, remembering Drew’s sour appraisal of the treatment.

“She’s scared. But Rose wants them for her. Rose was so beautiful. She once—”

Anna nodded.

“I’ve probably told you. But she was, and it meant a lot to her and she wants that for Bella.”

“What do you want for Bella?”

“I want her to have a chance at the brass ring, whatever that means.” Stacy took a long drink of his beer and let his eyes wander over the panorama that was northern New Mexico. “It’s not cheap.”

Anna’s eyes followed his over the soft blue distance. The beers were taking effect. Words were no longer as necessary.

“Rose’s used to better,” Stacy said after a while.

“So you’ve said. Old Number One was rich?”

“A lawyer. Megabucks.”

“The vultures always eat better than anyone else on the food chain,” Anna said. Meyers barely smiled.

“Rose left him. She says she had a problem with commitment.” Stacy made it sound like a compliment.

Remembering Bella’s remark about her dad leaving because of her deformity, Anna said nothing.

Stacy folded his hands around his Moosehead in a prayerful attitude and looked across the table at her. She smiled and he smiled back. Something sparked, ignited the rushes of emotion the medical had left strewn about their psyches.

Nature’s narcotic: more addicting than crack, harder to find than unadulterated Colombian, and, in the long run, more expensive than cocaine. But, God! did it get you there. Anna’s breath gusted out at sudden, unbidden memories of love.

“I’ve got to go.” She stood so abruptly her chair overturned.

“Yes.” Both of them pulled out wallets and tossed bills on the table. The waiter would get one hell of a tip, Anna thought as she walked out of the lounge.

“Can I give you a ride?” Stacy called after her. Anna just waved.

Unwilling to return to the cacophony that was home, she walked down the Wetherill Mesa Road till she was out of sight of the lodge, then sat under the protective drapery of a serviceberry bush. She felt like crying but was too long out of practice.

ANNA GROPED HER WAY TO THE KITCHEN TO START her morning coffee. Clad in striped men’s pajamas, Jennifer sat at the dining room table eating cereal. Already in uniform, Jamie played with an unlit cigarette.

She held it up as Anna passed. “Trying to decide whether or not to have breakfast,” she volunteered.

“Better light up,” Jennifer said. “It’s going to be a long day.”

“The longest.” Jamie pulled herself out of the straight-backed chair and took her morning drugs out onto the rear deck.

“Long day,” Jennifer repeated.

Since it was obviously expected of her and because early in the morning Anna actually found Jennifer’s refined version of the Southern drawl soothing, she asked, “Why long?”

“Longest day of the year. June twenty-first.”

“Right: solstice. If something doesn’t happen, I’m going to be miffed.” Anna spooned coffee into the drip filter.

“Oh, nothin’ will. You know Jamie. There’s always got to be something. A bunch of the interps got a backcountry permit to go down into Balcony House to watch the moon rise. That’s about it.”

“I’d think they’d want to watch the sun rise.” Coffee was dripping through the filter but too slowly. Balancing the cone to one side, Anna managed to pour what was in the pot into her cup without making too much of a mess. “That’s when all the magic is supposed to happen: spears of light through scientifically placed chinks—that sort of thing.”

Leaning in the doorway, she sipped and watched Jennifer eating cereal.

She and Jennifer had such disparate schedules they seldom had the opportunity to work together. But bit by bit Anna was getting glimpses that this hair-sprayed and lipsticked magnolia blossom had a penchant for heavy drinking, late nights, and speaking up for herself. Anna found herself warming up to the woman.

“Jamie mentioned something about Old Ones and solstice again last week when we were carrying Stephanie McFarland out of Cliff Palace.” Anna threw out the line, not sure what she was fishing for.

“Who knows what Jamie’s up to,” Jennifer said impatiently. “She says she hears Indian flute music coming out of the ruins at night; she’s always seeing some big thing—ghosts and mountain lions and big-horned sheep and cute boys. I never see anything except illegally parked cars.”

Jennifer sounded so disgusted that Anna laughed. “What about Paul Summers? He’s as cute as they come.”

“He’s got a girlfriend back home.”

“Back home is back home. Going to let it get in your way?”

“No, but it’s sure getting in his. I just hate fidelity.”

“Jimmy Russell?”

“He’s ten years younger than I am.” Jennifer pronounced “ten” as “tin.” She shrugged philosophically. “If things don’t start looking up soon, I’m going to have to start poachin’.”

Anna’s coffee was done. She walked back into the kitchen.

“Stacy’s kinda cute,” Jennifer mused.

Anna didn’t want to get into that.

 

 

RUNNING late, she called into service from the shower. At quarter after seven, hair confined in a braid and her teeth brushed, she pulled out of the Far View lot.

Hills was in Durango attending a wildland fire seminar, so Anna had the small four-wheel-drive truck. It was newer than the patrol car and had been built by Mitsubishi. Anna attributed the commercial success of Japanese cars to the fact that they were designed and built by a small people, hence they tended to fit American women far better than the wide-open spaces Buick and Dodge incorporated into their vehicles. At any rate, the seat didn’t hurt her back.

Late June marked the peak of the tourist season and there were cars waiting at the locked gates to Far View Ruin and Cedar Tree Tower. The four-way intersection was backed up four cars deep. Anna liked to play hero with the simple act of letting folks go where they wanted to. This morning the kindly ranger routine was turned into a comic interlude while she wrestled with one of Stacy’s signature twisted chain locks. Eventually she succeeded and was embarrassed by a round of applause.