by Nevada Barr
Easter hadn’t the strength to fight them and they turned her onto her side without much effort. She more or less fell over when Anna hit “three.”
The rain was sporadic and the thunder surrounded them, cracking down from upriver, rolling overhead, drumming up from Lajitas. “I’m getting wet,” Chrissie said peevishly. “I’m going back.” Either it was an idle promise or she realized it would be no drier where she’d come from than where she was. She didn’t move.
Anna looped her rope around Easter’s leg above her hock so the jutting bone would help keep it from slipping off. Rain made the adventure more dangerous but Anna resisted the impulse to rush. The mental image of the cow’s feet slipping through the ropes, the beast dangling by her hind legs while the half-tethered oar beat at her, then slipping from the other knot and falling to her death, was too grim to allow for hurried work.
“I want to help,” Chrissie said suddenly.
Anna ignored her.
“Stay out of the way, Chrissie,” Steve said, not unkindly.
“You stay out of the way.”
Anna tuned them out and looped the rope around Easter’s other leg. As she slipped her hand beneath the hoof to lift it, a bolt of lightning struck so close Anna ducked and covered her head as if that could ward off a zillion volts of electricity.
“Holy moly,” Steve gasped.
Chrissie shrieked.
“We need to get down,” Paul said. “This is getting unsafe.”
“We’re almost done,” Anna said. “Another minute.”
“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.”
“Somebody bring me the damned 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 constituent felt her passion but the sharpest never felt that she was not in control.
For reasons Darden could never fathom, people tended to think her passion was their passion, 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 nobody.
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 stage-whisper, or “Momma lost her diaphragm,” or “Why do you pick your nose? I don’t see any boogers in it.”
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 nobody 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 shore 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 willies 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. Assassins 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 bumping 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 energy 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. Nobody 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 casserole 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 cocktail 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 ticket 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 . . . hellhole.”
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 shit 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 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 bloody 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.
“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.