"I'll hold you to that beer," Harland said finally. "And especially that laugh. But right now chivalry's dead. You get to handle Karl all alone. He hates anybody messing with 'his' truck." He nodded toward the gate where Karl, looking like a storm about to break, was hurrying in from the parking lot. Harland gave Anna a wink and, whistling, sauntered across the yard to his office.
Investigative paraphernalia safely tucked out of sight, Anna had a little more presence of mind. "'Morning, Karl," she said easily. "I left my sunglasses in the barn yesterday. I thought you might have picked them up for me. They were on top of the oat bin."
Karl stared at her for a full three seconds, his face utterly blank, and Anna felt her belly grow cold.
"No," he said. "They weren't there. I gave the mules some oats with their dinner. I'd've seen them."
Anna had no idea whether Karl had been fooled or not but the fun had gone out of the morning as quickly as it had come into it. "Thanks anyway," she said and made her escape.
"Anna, headed back to housing?"
It was Harland. Anna hoped she'd not been obviously hightailing it out of Maintenance.
"Yup. Getting my pack. Backcountry patrol."
"I'll walk with you, keep you safe from the forces of evil." He smiled, his gray eyes taking in the hundred yards of peaceful road between the yard and the housing area. The great threats were a desert cottontail the size of a small boot and two butter-colored butterflies. "I forgot my radio," he confided in a stage whisper as he fell into step beside her.
Anna laughed. "I do it all the time." She was mildly impressed that he walked. Most of the staff seemed to drive their private cars the quarter-mile to the Maintenance Yard where they traded them for a government vehicle.
"Perfect day for the high country," Harland said wistfully. "I wish I was going with you. Don't ever let them promote you to GS-11," he said earnestly. "You'll be trapped behind a desk forever after."
Anna looked up at the green and brown hills, then the pale cliffs of the escarpment. The tops were fringed black with evergreens robbed of color and shape by distance. "I won't," she said, and meant it.
Harland smiled. His teeth were straight and white but they looked like they were his own.
Fifty is not old, Anna found herself thinking, and wondered why.
Harland reached down, picked up a cigarette butt and put it in his hip pocket. "What has Karl done to get the Ranger Division's notice?" he asked.
Having no credible answer, Anna asked him a question in return. "Speaking of notice, the other day you said something about Craig Eastern being… well… not quite all here."
"Mentally ill," Harland said bluntly.
"Yes. And to take care of myself. I've given that some thought. Not much, because I don't know what in the hell I'm supposed to make of it. Care to elaborate?"
"Not really," Harland replied.
For a minute, or nearly so, they walked without talking. When they were at the seasonal housing where Anna lived, Harland stopped. She deliberated whether this was some gentlemanly hint that the walk was over or if he'd thought better of keeping the rationale behind his cryptic warning a secret.
It was the latter.
"Please say this will stay between you and me," Harland said, not looking at her. "Because I'm going to tell you anyway and I'd just as soon sleep sound at night."
"It will," Anna promised, hoping she could keep it.
"Craig suffers from paranoid delusions. He's been institutionalized twice for it. He's on medications but he has had violent episodes in the past. You know how he feels about human beings in general, how protective he is of the land. But maybe you didn't know that he particularly fears women. Especially women he is sexually attracted to. He feels women use sexual politics to outdistance him. Just something I wanted you to be aware of, take care about. That's all."
"How do you know?" Anna was embarrassed at how suspicious she sounded. Suspicion was becoming a habit.
"Craig was at the mental institution where my wife lives," Harland said simply. "In Austin."
"Oh," was all Anna could find to say.
Harland Roberts laid a hand on her arm. "It's okay," he said kindly. "They've got trees and flush toilets, chicken on Sunday-everything. It's a far cry from Mrs. Rochester's attic."
Anna nodded and echoed, if a bit weakly, his smile.
"Give my regards to the high country," he said and strode off toward the "real" houses.
"I will," Anna called after him, wanting to give him some return for the confidence.
There was no time for that second cup of coffee. Anna packaged the samples and the hypodermic and sent them to the police lab in Roswell, New Mexico, care of Timothy Dayton. They'd gone to law enforcement school together. He would do it as a favor, eschewing channels.
"Three-eleven; three-one-five en route up the Tejas." Anna radioed in her position then zipped her radio into the side pocket of her pack. It would be good to get into the high country again, up where it was clean. Too many days had been spent down among people.
With each step up the glaring limestone of the Tejas Trail, she felt a thread break; one of the peevish tethers of social and professional minutiae snap. Alone, in the backcountry, politics, sex, murder, and all their derivations would fade. They never vanished entirely; mostly the clamor just dulled, like the roar of trucks on 62/180 that poured endless trailer-tank loads of natural gas into Mexico.
One day, Anna thought, she would walk far enough, go deep enough, stay long enough, that the toxins of humanity would finally work completely out of her system, leaving her mind new again. That would be the trip she would never return from. Molly would find her living on roots and berries, wearing nothing but a loincloth and humming a mantra in some mountaintop cave.
Anna smiled at the picture. Molly in Italian pumps and a Giorgio Armani suit standing in the mesquite, cigarette in hand.
Someday.
Bucolic splendor, peace of mind, oneness with Nature, all the elevated thoughts buoying Anna up the endless switchbacks of the Tejas, evaporated as she rounded the sharp bend above Devil's Hallway.
Shaded from the rays of the morning sun by a fist of wind-carved stone, Craig Eastern sat with his back to a rock and his legs across the trail. The bill of a white baseball cap with the green fist of the EARTH FIRST! logo emblazoned on it covered his eyes. Muscular neck and shoulders, displayed nicely by a gray tank top, sloped down from small flat ears.
Anna stopped several feet from him and waited. Of course he had heard her crunching ascent. One did not sneak in lug-soled boots and a heavy pack. Head down, he was scribbling in a little yellow notebook. When he'd finished he snapped it shut with a gesture reminiscent of Captain Kirk snapping shut his communicator.
"Howdy, Anna," he said solemnly, looking up. He smiled and it was as if an elf or a child suddenly took over the man's body. His dark eyes glowed, his lips curved in a sweet smile exposing small, even, very white teeth. One cheek dimpled.
Because of this man-or, more accurately, because of what Harland had told her about him-Anna had been locking her door nights. At that moment Eastern couldn't have looked less like an anti-social psychotic or more like an appealing boy. His thirty-six years had scarcely marked his face and, with the cap, the thinning hair was hidden.
Surely, she thought, no one with that choirboy grin would do any real damage.
"Howdy, Craig," she echoed. She wanted to be friendly, easy with him, but she knew too many things she had no right to know. Things that made her look past the smile and the dimple; made her look for the insanity that Roberts assured her lurked behind what they'd all accepted as yet one more form of the desert lunacy that made the Southwest a place of heroes, tall tales and strange truths.