Nevada Barr - Anna Pigeon 11 - Flashback

by Flashback(Lit)

  As good an explanation as any, she told herself. Evils sufficient unto the day.

  With the help of Linda's work-lined face, Anna pulled herself rapidly back together. Linda was signing but Anna's brain was not yet quite right-side up. She made the "okay" with both hands, hoping that was all the answer Linda required. Apparently it was, the agitated finger wiggling and twitching ceased. Bubbles returned to their normal noisy bursts. The women looked down on the offending wreck.

  An old hand, Linda hung in the water not moving, weight and buoyancy perfectly balanced. Anna, her weight belt a tad heavy, had to kick gently to maintain. Missing the one fin, she listed slightly.

  Yards of beautifully colored, incredibly varied and terribly fragile living coral had been crushed or scraped away. Anna felt the loss with greater sorrow than the loss of whoever belonged to the hairy, yellow-clad arm. She justified her inhumane leanings with the myth that her job inured her to human suffering.

  The wreck hadn't completely turned turtle. The coral crevice it wedged itself into during the original descent had stopped it. The top half of the cabin door-the left side, had the boat been upright-was above the coral boulder.

  Linda pointed. Down at the bottom, just peeking out of the crush between cabin and coral, was the finger. An image of the Wicked Witch of the East, smashed under Dorothy's house, only her feet protruding, came into Anna's mind, and she half expected to see the finger and the mangled palm to which it was attached shrivel and disappear beneath the fallen boat.

  At her elbow, Linda was scribbling on an underwater pad. Finished, she showed Anna: "We go in now?" Anna shook her head and took the notebook.

  "I go for ropes. Replace fin. You stay out of boat."

  Linda read, then made the okay sign and pointed at Anna's NPS camera. Understanding was established. Linda would continue to record the wreckage. Anna would refurbish her gear and get what was necessary to work safely around the sunken boat.

  In the ten minutes it took to return to the Activa, collect what she needed and swim back, the light grew immeasurably better. The sun had jumped high and sudden above the horizon. Some of the extra matter put into suspension by the shifting of the hull had settled out. All in all, with Linda swimming gracefully about snapping pictures of the kind required on any routine accident investigation, Anna was hard pressed to remember the alarums of a quarter of an hour before. Probably the facility to forget was one of the reasons she stayed in the line of work she'd chosen. Looking back, no matter what had actually transpired, it never seemed all that bad. Still, she was shaken. Not by the trapping of her fin, but by the sense she'd suffered that it was intentional. This was something she couldn't afford to think too long on. She purposely wiped the weirdness from her mind and concentrated on what was in front of her.

  While she'd been gone the finger had disappeared. Anna mentally tipped her hat to L. Frank Baum. Obviously the man had done his homework.

  Linda, good as her word and essentially a cautious woman, had stayed away from the bow section. Several yards from the wedged hull, her back to it, she crouched froglike over a shard of the shattered boat, the camera held four inches from her mask as she framed the shot. Thirty or forty feet out, laden with coiled line, Anna glided toward her.

  Movement caught her eye and she looked past Linda. A bubble the size of a beach ball was squeezing out of the cracked keel where the bow had upended when the wreck had shifted. The bubble's elongated shape moved, expanded. It was not clear but filled with roiling sulphurous gray. For an instant Anna's mind froze in wonder. Once before she'd seen a bubble like that. With the speed of thought, the memory came clear. She and Molly, both little girls, had been playing with a length of fuse left over from when their dad, afraid they would collapse and kill somebody, had dynamited unstable caves dug in a sandpit by the local schoolkids. They'd put one end of the fuse in a puddle of water and lit the other. When the fuse burnt to the end, a yellow bubble appeared on the puddle. They popped it and a puff of smoke was released.

  The boat was still burning. When it rolled, the flames inside must have found a new source of air and fuel. Dropping the line, Anna kicked hard for the first mate, still oblivious in her concentration. Muted, high-pitched noises reached Anna's ears as she impotently called Linda's name without ungluing her lips from the regulator's mouthpiece.

  Intuition or unusually acute hearing brought the other woman's head up, stirring her yellow hair into a mini-nova around her face.

  Kicking for all she was worth, Anna pointed. Linda turned to look back. Suspended, weightless, her body rotated with her head. A nightmare sense of slow motion, of trying to run through viscous mud, overtook Anna. A booming-thunder through rain-and the keel of the ship expanded as if it had taken a deep breath. Cracks appeared. Red fire, incongruous forty feet under the ocean, opened, then burst out in gouts of flame. The hull exploded outward, shards of razor-sharp Plexiglas shot like torpedoes in every direction. A bubble of black veined with red blossomed.

  Linda, her body half turned toward the blast, was snatched up by unseen forces. Arms and legs flew out, then were crushed inward, a doll being wadded up, tossed away. Her head snapped out of the circle of flesh. Her mask was ripped from her face. Eyes wide, mouth open, she seemed to be screaming, but Anna heard nothing.

  A wave of force smacked into Anna and she felt herself falling. There was no up or down. Just an endless fall into an airless darkness.

  4

  I cannot say how I knew it was the confederate boy, Joel Lane.

  The lamps in the sally port were set too far apart for proper lighting. Maybe it was the black hair. Lord knows his hair was the only thing unchanged, the only thing left that was pretty about him.

  Still and all, I could see enough of Private Lane's face to know I didn't want Tilly going any closer. But you know Tilly, ever the rusher-in when the angels are thinking twice about treading. She thinks she is so grown and worldly. To Tilly everything is black or white. Having been married to the U.S. Army lo these many years, I have grown accustomed to black and blue and shades of gray.

  But even I have never seen a man beaten as badly as this poor boy. Oh, Peggy, even with you seeing Dennis after he died and your work with the wounded in New York, you would have wept for Tilly's soldier. He had been so lovely, and Joseph's guards beat him till he didn't even look human anymore, then strung him up against the stones in the sally port.

  Tilly recognized the boy and tore herself away from me. (I had been clutching her rather firmly to my side, anticipating some such end to our outing-though not Joel and not such brutality-usually it's a drunkard who at least doesn't feel his tortures till he's been cut down.) The horrid girl is as strong as she is quick, and I had little choice but to run after her or stay where I was.

  Tilly was wailing "Oh no! Oh no!" and, though I believe she was sincerely upset and have pity on that account, she threw her arms forward then clasped them to her breast too much like that picture of that new French actress, Sarah Bernhardt.

  Her noise didn't bring the boy's head up or cause him to move at all-which was worrisome-but it brought Sargent Sinapp out of the guardroom. Though he's one of Joseph's cronies, I have never liked the man. Sinapp is too thick. His lips are thick. His fingers blunt and so thick it's a wonder he can make a fist-though that seems to be the one thing he excels at. Even his ears are thick. "Cauliflowered," they call them. It comes from fighting. His neck is so thick it really cannot be said to exist, there being so little differentiation between the bottom of his ears and the top of his shoulders.

  Tilly was brought to a sudden stop by Sinapp. Behind him the guardroom was brightly lit, cards no doubt being more important to keep an eye on than murderers, thieves and enemy soldiers. He moved his thickness to one side, and the light shone full on Tilly.

  She was a pretty picture: face caked with makeup like a you-know-what, hair all up on her head, hands clasped beseechingly. The wind blew Tilly's cotton skirt against her body. The little minx was not wearin
g her petticoats. It was clear to me and to the disgusting Sergeant Sinapp that she'd not even bothered with pantaloons. Every line of leg and thigh was clearly delineated. Sinapp actually licked his lips. Licked his lips! His great pale tongue poking out like a lizard seeking an ant. In an instant more I expect he would have begun smacking and drooling like a starving hound. I did hear a low moan and I don't think it was from the unfortunate Private Lane.

  "Sargent Sinapp," I barked. I've not been an army wife all these years without having learned the voice of authority. Tilly broke from her pose, thank God, and turned so the wind no longer played its trick with her dress. Freed from what could only be lust in that paralyzing form that sometimes takes men, Sinapp sucked his tongue back in and stood as close to attention as his tree-trunk body would allow.

  "What is the meaning of this?" I demanded. My appearance from the shadows startled him, and his recent thoughts had evidently been so wicked it didn't occur to him that he well might ask that question of Tilly and me.

  For a moment, while guilt and confusion rattled around in his very small brain, I thought I could get past him easily. Unfortunately, as with many men accustomed to few emotions and comfortable with none but anger, he got mad. Had I not been his captain's wife I expect he might have overstepped the bounds of common decency.

  "You got no business-"

  I could see his slow mental processes, so recently scrambled, lining themselves back up. Right quick before he could bluster himself back into some semblance of a sergeant at arms, I stepped up close and sniffed.

  "You've been drinking," I said with all the disapproval I could muster. Whether he'd been drinking or not, I couldn't tell. Amid the swamp of odium that drifted from him, sorting out a single scent was past even my bloodhound abilities. The laundresses at Fort Jefferson often take home three times as much pay as their soldier husbands each month. They are grossly underpaid. Woolen uniforms in the sodden heat of July wring much in the way of bodily effluvia from men far less unpalatable than Sergeant Sinapp.

  "Have not!" he countered, sounding so much like your Leonard did when he was three and into breaking things and pestering the dogs that I nearly laughed.

  Tilly had taken this moment out of my control and the sergeant's thrall to scoot her unpantalooned self behind my back and into the sally port where her pet rebel was.

  The sight of young Joel Lane robbed me of any rebuke I might, for Molly's sake, have given Tilly. Lips and eyelids were swelled, the skin stretched so tight I feared it might burst and spill the blue-black blood pooled beneath. The once-clean line of his jaw was blurred, misshapen, and his neat close ears puffed, red, angry and probably never to resume their pretty shape.

  It is common practice to punish prisoners and union soldiers alike by tying their hands behind their backs and hoisting them up till their toes barely touch the ground. As vicious as this practice is, it evidently wasn't sufficiently cruel for Sinapp. Private Lane had been strung up by his thumbs; this I have never seen but only read of in books of medieval tortures.

  The poor boy's thumbs were the size and color of plums. Tilly slid to her knees and began to cry. This time I saw nothing of theatrics in her. I often forget how young she is-or I choose to forget how inured to brutish behavior I have become.

  "Cut this man down," I commanded the sergeant, hoping he was still cowed by my previous accusation of imbibing.

  He'd had time to reinsert his spine and gather his few thoughts.

  "I can't do that, ma'am. This ain't no place for you to be. This here's army business.

  "That man was talking traitor talk. Going on about Mr. Lincoln like his foul murder was a right and good thing. That's why he got himself strung up. I'm making no apologies that he got what was coming. When he gets cut down he'll be put to carrying shot-a hundred and twenty-eight pounder or my name ain't Cobb Sinapp."

  During the rehearsals I have gotten to know Joel somewhat, and he didn't strike me as a political man, certainly not one to speak out if it would get him beat half to death which surely even the dullest reb here must know could happen with tensions so high. Joel was more likely a reckless young man who had joined the war against the union because that's what the young dandies in his circle were doing. Still, I cannot completely discount Cobb (what a ridiculous name, undoubtedly he was called after the kind of pipe his mother smoked in the birthing room) Sinapp's words. Who knows what strange twists might exist in the mind of a southern boy, and an actor to boot?

  "Cut him down at once," I insisted. "Or I'll-"

  "I'll scream," Tilly said, and I've never seen that exquisite face of hers look so hard. "I'll scream and I'll go on screaming until the whole fort comes down around us."

  I must say I was relieved at her interruptions. I had no idea what my threat was to have been. I certainly couldn't threaten to tell my husband. Sergeant Sinapp knows in what high regard Joseph holds me, though he'd never dare speak of it or show any overt disrespect.

  Tilly's threat sounded childish to my ears, but it put the fear of God into the wretched Sinapp.

  "Now no need for that kinda talk, missy. What with them murderin' cowards, this place is already a..."

  I suppose he was searching for a metaphor: powder keg, hornets' nest or some such, but the limitation of his intellect stopped him. However, much as I dislike admitting it even to you, the most forgiving of souls, Sergeant Sinapp had a point. The "murderin' cowards" to whom the sergeant referred are the Lincoln conspirators. Not the man who shot him, of course, or that woman who was put to death, but Samuel Arnold, Edward Spangler and Dr. Mudd, who is said to have set John Booth's leg after he broke it leaping to the stage. As if we weren't enough on edge, knowing that those who were at least in part responsible for the death of the president are to be with us soon has brought the hatred to the surface.

  "Cut him down, cut him down," Tilly began. A smallish boy-faced fellow emerged from the guardroom behind Sinapp and proffered his knife. Sinapp cut Private Lane down, letting the boy fall all in a heap on the stone. Had Tilly not gotten in the way, I expect Joel Lane's skull would have been cracked open when he hit.

  The boy-faced soldier had the good sense to vanish after that, but the sergeant stood around being of no use to us but needing to vent his frustration. He threatened to tell Joseph, which I'm sure he will, and I will have to answer for Tilly's soft heart. Joseph won't do much but to yell. He learned a long time ago, the first time he struck me, that he had but three options: to kill me outright, never to strike me again, or to sleep with one eye open for the rest of his natural life.

  Without help there was sadly little Tilly and I could do. Private Lane was too heavy for us to move. We asked the sergeant to help us but he would not so much as fetch water to wet the boy's lips or bathe his poor ruined face. Between us, Tilly and I made him as comfortable as we could there on the stones of the sally port and got him to drink a little water I fetched myself. Then we had to leave him.

  Tilly begged Sinapp prettily to be compassionate, and I made a number of threats I have no authority to carry out, that if Joel Lane was further damaged when we returned, much in the way of ill luck would befall whomsoever mistreated him.

  We'd stayed too long as it was-the theatrical would have started and only by rushing would Tilly and I be back in time for our entrance. The drama of the situation outweighed the artificial drama of our little play, and I had to all but drag our little sister from the rebel's side. Many evils are bound to come from this act of kindness, not the least of which is Tilly, playing at Miss Nightingale, will probably feel obliged to fall in love with her patient, or fancy she has.

  On the way back, as we ran in a most undignified fashion across the parade ground toward our bows and pinafores, Tilly suddenly said: "Our duet!" (They had adapted "Somebody's Darling" for two parts.) "We can't do it, his being gone. And I looked so pretty in that blue silk robe." I took heart from that. If the baggage is still thinking of her own self and vain pursuits, we can hope tonight's debacle hasn't
damaged her spirit too badly.

  For a time the excitement of being in a theatrical production gave us respite from the sad state of the rebel soldier we'd left quite possibly dying, but I dared not even think of that. I suppose it's unchristian, but I think the bright lights and tumultuous applause took our minds completely. The stage-built by the prisoners-is small but utterly delightful. I continue to be amazed by the varied talents one can garner simply by imprisoning a section of the American armies. Which side they fought for doesn't seem to be a factor. The fort boasts several excellent carpenters; the lights (every candle and lamp on the key was pressed into service) had been cunningly shaped and aimed by a union deserter from New York. Before the war he worked for a clothier in the city of New York, and one of his tasks was to provide attractive lighting for the window displays and the live mannequins. We even had an exquisitely painted back-drop provided by a burglar-cum-muralist from Philadelphia. War and theater seem to be good bedfellows.