Endangered Species

by Barr, Nevada

  She was getting stoned.

  She’d not been high, at least not on dope, since she’d given it up twenty-one years before. To fight off the demons, she tried to remember what she could of those long-gone days. Much of it was a blur. She remembered the silly things: the munchies and the giggles, the lethargy of sitting in front of an old black-and-white television watching Marcus Welby reruns. The memory of the bad acid trip that had forever ended her drug days forced itself into her mind and for a moment it seemed as if the precarious walls of her shelter were closing in of their own accord, flapping slowly like the splintered wings of a wooden butterfly.

  Don’t go there, she told herself in the words of a current cliché. The cliché was one she particularly despised and the fact that she had used it sent another stab of irrational fear through her.

  Fires on both sides were catching on well. The inside of the hog pen danced with the flames, an orange and black disco light-show without music. Anna closed her eyes against it and tried to think, tried not to breathe, and failed at both. Flickering red and orange played across her closed eyelids. Fight it as she would, she had the sense of falling—tilting first one way and then another as if she would topple from her sitting position. The crackling burned at her brain in a low-grade fever and her skin crawled with sweat and fear and God knew what else.

  At length the busy noises abated and Anna dared to hope that the Hansons had gone away and she could do the same. Opening her eyes required more courage than she would have thought possible. Had keeping them closed not been the greater of the two evils, she doubted she could have managed it.

  Directly in front of her, framed in the angle of rough lumber and illuminated by the light of the fires, the Hansons sat in folding lawn chairs. She in dark blue polyester pants and a sleeveless cotton shell that exposed too much flabby upper arm, he in faded uniform trousers and a worn polo shirt, each with a beer in hand: a Norman Rockwell vision of hell. Again laughter threatened to tear its way out of Anna’s throat and again it was quelled by a wave of ice-cold fear.

  Time ratcheted uncomfortably.

  Anna had no idea how long she’d sat in the hovel breathing smoke. A minute, an hour, three? All seemed equally defensible. Breathing was easier but whether the fires had grown hot enough to draw the smoke upward or whether the dope was having an anesthetic effect on her lungs, she wasn’t sure. The impulse to cough had left her and she made a point of starting a “small blessings” list.

  To keep her mind from wandering to less auspicious climes, she forced herself to concentrate on the Hansons. From all appearances they were relaxed, happy even. If Anna had had to categorize the tone they’d set for this bizarre evening’s entertainment, she would have called it relief. The Hansons acted relieved.

  How on earth they could be so sanguine about torching their cash crop mystified her. Of course, the way things were going, how her head remained on her shoulders was beginning to mystify her. The time, effort, and risk that would have gone into farming the plot had to be considerable, but the sudden expansion to take care of the new plants and the demands they put on the cultivation didn’t strike her as something to be so lightly—not to mention downright cheerfully—destroyed.

  No answers suggested themselves. Time drifted. Anna drifted. Once, twice, maybe a hundred times—she couldn’t recall, nor did it seem particularly important—one Hanson or the other would abandon the lawn chair to poke up the fire or get another beer.

  More than once, Anna had come gently back to earth having totally forgotten where she was or why. Each time, she was called back from the brink by the reality of the pains that were beginning to take over her body: aches in her ankles, numbness in her hips, itching on her legs and arms. With the unpleasant clarity born of discomfort, the why of her predicament returned and she was reminded not to crawl out of the sanctity of her hog pen and into the lit clearing. Then more smoke would be sucked into her brain and, for a while, life would be on hold.

  High was not what it used to be, she thought in a moment between the drifts. Too much paranoia had been added to the mix: fear of the consequences, of the years, but mostly of her own mind. In her twenties she’d trusted it to guide her, answer her questions, make the right choices. Somewhere in her thirties she’d lost faith. She saw her mind now as a moderately useful, if highly overrated, organ, one susceptible to chemical storms, hormonal droughts, and the phases of the moon. Gone were the days when she could alter her reality with impunity. Being stoned had become less a matter of flying than of hanging on to some ragged edge of sanity and waiting for the smoke to clear.

  THE LAST THING she remembered was a sudden flare of light and Mitch Hanson’s voice crackling through the saw of the flames: “Well, there goes the last of Ellen’s college tuition.”

  “She saved her daddy’s life. That should be worth at least a year with the Seven Sisters.”

  “Orinsing—” and an echo.

  CHAPTER Twenty-two

  MOLLY HAD REFUSED to cry. She’d sat across the table in the pub, arm’s length from Frederick, her nerves so tight he could almost hear them hum. The face he’d come to think of as exquisite—a word he customarily reserved for sculpture and fine porcelain—was closed to him. Pain was written clearly in the too-wide eyes and the controlled line of her lips, but he was not invited to solace her.

  Over a Scotch she did not drink, she told him the baby killer the headlines had shouted about was the man on whose behalf she’d testified several years previously; the last time she’d ever been lured to the witness stand. Her testimony, along with the obfuscatory powers of the defense attorney and the slow wits of the prosecutor, had gotten the man a light sentence on an insanity plea. He’d served just over three years. Two weeks after he was paroled he had sexually assaulted and killed the three-year-old boy the tourists from Ely, Nevada, had discovered in the shopping bag.

  The psychiatrist was walking the thin line between guilt and responsibility. The subject cut too close to the bone for her to share it in detail with a stranger, she’d said, and Frederick had been stung. He temporarily put aside his bizarre courtship of Anna’s sister. To give Molly back some semblance of control, he steered the conversation toward the concrete: suspects, clues, the possible connection to the threats she’d received.

  Despite the emotional pressure Molly was under, she hadn’t come unprepared. Just once, Frederick wished she would. Then you could fancy it a tryst, he mocked himself; still, it would have pleased him.

  As it was, she pulled out her black briefcase. Her secretary had spent the morning in research. Lester Mack, the man arrested for the murder of the boy, and the man whom Dr. Pigeon had been instrumental in saving from life in prison, if not death row, was paroled the same week she received the first death threat.

  The stakes had definitely been raised. Motive, should they now be on the right track, was no longer a mystery.

  THOUGH LESTER MACK had been released and Molly threatened before anyone should have known who murdered the boy in the Bloomingdale’s bag, Frederick tracked down the parents of the three-year-old victim the following morning. Through his contacts with the NYPD, he learned that the parents were young, both Puerto Rican, with very little understanding of English. The mother had been sixteen and the father eighteen when Lester Mack’s trial was in the news. He doubted even now that they connected Molly Pigeon with the murder of their son. Frederick moved on to more promising territory.

  Four years before, Mack had been accused and found guilty of the assault and killing of two other children, both boys, both Puerto Rican, and both from poor families. Either Lester Mack had a racial taste in victims or he was clever enough to realize the difficulty poor families, particularly those with no command of the English language, would have in pushing a successful investigation and prosecution through an already overburdened legal system.

  In an attempt to avoid being racist himself—in the sense of writing off the families of the previous victims as suspects—Frederick uncov
ered their whereabouts. One family, shattered by the death of their son, had returned to Puerto Rico, where they lived with the husband’s mother. Frederick called and spoke with a brother—whether of the wife or the husband, his understanding of Spanish wasn’t good enough to discern. As near as he could tell, no one in that household was aware of Mack’s release or of his rearrest on suspicion of the same charges that had so impacted their lives.

  The parents of Mack’s other early victim had long since divorced. No one knew where the father had gone but his ex-wife thought he might have moved to Los Angeles. She had remarried and lived in Jackson Heights, where she worked in her husband’s dry-cleaning business. She had read of the recent murder of the little boy. It had brought back the nightmares, she said.

  When Frederick questioned her about Dr. Pigeon, she seemed to have only a vague recollection of the name. There had been a number of forensics experts and expert witnesses at the Lester Mack trial. She spoke English well enough to converse, but she’d been unable to follow the technical questions and the answers from the witness stand.

  Frederick hung up convinced she’d not linked Molly with the release of Mack, nor did she have the linguistic skills to pen the threatening notes and alter her accent sufficiently to leave the phone messages Molly had played for him.

  HAVING ARRIVED AT another dead end, maxed out his Visa, and irritated his boss, Frederick could no longer justify staying in Manhattan and had reluctantly boarded a flight to O’Hare. They’d not yet entered the airspace over Ohio and already he was missing Molly, or more accurately, the way he felt when he was with her. “Young” about summed it up. Banal as it was, he suspected this was what was meant by midlife crisis. Had he seen it coming, he hoped he would have had the good sense to buy a sports car or indulge in some other harmless cliché.

  A sudden memory made him laugh aloud, drawing an uncomfortable glance from the matronly woman in the seat next to him. Two years before, he’d very nearly bought that sports car. He’d lusted after a lurid purple Ford Probe he’d seen in a dealer’s window. He would have bought it if it hadn’t been for his daughter, Candice. One night he’d mentioned it and she’d said in a voice rich with the scorn left over from her recent adolescence: “Yeah, Dad, like a Probe is a sports car . . .”

  On his lap, closed in a battered leather notebook he’d carried for fifteen years, were three half-written letters to Molly, all carefully crafted with wit and charm. It was just a mind game, he told himself. He’d never send them. Unless Molly wanted him to. There was the loophole. One come-hither look and Frederick knew he would betray Anna in actuality as he had already in his heart. Not without a backward glance. He’d scourge himself for a week or two but the heady narcotic of new romance would kill the pain.

  The world was full of people doing as he did on various levels. Most of them were sublimely unaware of their actions, of the absurdity of their self-made tempests. He wished he were one of them.

  Molly was attracted to him. Frederick was an old enough hand to smell the pheromones. Whether she’d give in to it, he had no idea. He looked at the letters he’d started and wondered if he dared send them.

  It had been so long since he’d been rejected by a woman, he wondered how well he’d handle it. Would he sulk, get angry, scurry away with his tail between his legs, pretend it never happened? Even thinking about it made him feel defenseless and a bit of a boob. Often the worst things that happen are when someone important sees to it nothing happens at all; a refusal of love, friendship, or help when it is most needed.

  Leaning back, he tilted the seat the allotted five degrees and let that thought rattle around in his head. There was something about it that had caught in his mind, the idea of rejection being the unkindest cut, indifference the greatest evil, the murder of what might have been.

  Tray tables were being put up in preparation for landing by the time the thought came to rest. That first night he’d met with Molly he had asked her about publicity. She mentioned the Mack trial. She said that after Lester Mack’s sentencing she’d refused to appear for the defense ever again but that, because of the success of the defense, she’d been—how did she put it? It seemed important to remember her exact words. She said she had people “beating down her door.”

  The flight attendant tapped Frederick and he obediently returned his seat back to the full upright position. Before stowing his notebook as requested, he scribbled down a line of inquiry to follow up.

  A new direction and an excuse to call Molly. Not a bad two hours’ work.

  CHAPTER Twenty-three

  “ORINSING.”

  Anna was overwhelmed by the world’s incomprehensibility. All was black as pitch and she couldn’t move. She probably wasn’t dead. Twice before she’d thought she was dead and had been mistaken. She’d come to believe assuming one was dead—or wishing one was—indicated one was still living. Only mildly reassuring under the circumstances.

  “Why does everything have to be so fucking mysterious. ” Mouth and throat were dry and the words whispered out like wind over parched earth, but it was reassuring to know some portions of her anatomy still functioned. If she could speak, she was breathing. Always a good sign.

  Emboldened by success, she reached up to see if her eyes were open. Her knuckles rasped painfully against splintered boards. As through a shifting mist, memories of the night came back. She was in the hog pen, her forehead pushed against the slanting lumber of the roof. At some point she’d slipped the surly bonds of earth and tipped over; the slanted sides of the narrow enclosure had kept her from falling. Both legs were folded under her and both were as insensate as the weathered wood, so deeply asleep they ignored her orders to move, not responding with so much as a tingle to indicate life. They felt as if they’d been packed with sand, but she could move her hands and arms. She used one to prop herself upright. Her head weighed a ton and pressure had built inside to an uncomfortable degree.

  Directly in front of her the world appeared vaguely lighter. Somewhere along the line she must have opened her eyes. They burned and teared. The view didn’t change but she could feel water running down her cheeks.

  “Water,” she croaked, testing her voice. Thirst bore down upon her with a vengeance and she clawed her yellow pack from where it lay behind her left hip. Fumbling off the cap of the bottle, she held it to her lips with both hands, spilling water down the sides of her face. The melodrama of the picture she presented made her laugh. Her lungs sore from processing smoke, the sound came out on a hacking cough.

  For a tense moment she waited for the racket to bring down retribution. There wasn’t a sound from without. In a way she was disappointed. The shed had become intolerable and she wasn’t altogether sure she could get out of it without assistance. Feeling as she did, the thought of being murdered—if the dispatch was quick and painless—wasn’t without its attractions.

  In a past now obscured by cannabis smoke, she had folded her legs into a half-lotus. Her lap was lost in the darkness that wrapped cocoonlike around her. The puzzle of how to disentangle limbs she could neither see nor feel baffled her. Her brain too was cocooned in darkness and smoke. Idly she wondered how many more little gray cells had gone the way of the dodo.

  A fuzzy thought made its appearance in her blasted mindscape: At least I won’t get glaucoma for a while. That brought on the giggles and she knew she was still high. Paranoia made its familiar appearance on the tail end of the laughter and she waited, consciously breathing, till it passed.

  Reality began reasserting itself in negatives: it was not light, she was not straight, she was not dead, no one was going to come and pull her out of the hog pen. Armed with knowledge of the parameters, she took action. Helen Keller learns yoga, she thought as she felt down the length of her calf till her hands closed around the ankle that rested on the inner thigh of the opposite leg. Grasping it firmly, she pulled it free and tossed it in the direction of the outside world. It fell with a clunk that sounded as if it had struck something soli
d. Easy, she reminded herself. In the not-too-distant future she would have to pay the price for any injuries inflicted.

  The plan was a bust. One leg under her and one thrust out in front cemented her more firmly than ever onto the shed floor. Walking her hands back down the leg from the knee, she hauled the ankle up to its former resting place. After what seemed a long time in thought, she gave up trying to outsmart her body. She hurled the yellow pack out first, then, using the strength of her arms, pulled herself forward, rocking her torso over the useless legs. With hands and elbows, she dragged her body from the enclosure.

  The smell of smoke had given way to the smell of wet ash. Anna rolled onto her back and sat up, her sleeping legs splayed like logs before her. Shh, she heard her grandmother’s voice say in her head. You’ll wake them up . . . And when she did, it would be excruciating; the unbearable tickle of sensation returning to a million oxygen-starved cells.

  Not ready to face that, she left them unmolested and dug the flashlight from her pack. The lawn chairs were gone, the piles burned down to ash, the ash cooled with water and raked over with needles and debris. Shining the narrow beam as far as it would reach into the recesses between the thinly scattered oaks, Anna noted the mature plants were missing as well. Those plants had achieved the stature of small trees, twelve or fifteen feet high and carrying enough dope to retail for $1,500 to $2,500 a plant. They were gone as if they’d never been. Even the roots had been dug up, or the stems cut flush and covered with leaf litter. The Hansons had been busy little bees.