"When? When are you coming?" Molly didn't sound as pleased as Anna had anticipated.
"I don't know…" Anna faltered. The plan was too new for dates. "I've got a ton of annual leave coming to me. I thought I'd come in September if-"
"Ha!" Molly exploded. "IF. What in the hell are you up to, Anna? What's going on? You're doing some silly damn thing with that snake and lion business."
"What makes-"
"Hmph!" Molly cut her off. As children they'd both practiced doing hmph like it was spelled in books. Molly had become very good at it. "Psychiatrists aren't omniscient for nothing," she said. "The snake and lion business, Anna. Out with it. I hate suspense. Always read the last page first. Adjust expectations."
Anna sighed. "I've done 'How,'" she admitted.
"And?" Molly demanded.
There were times Anna wished her sister had gone into interior decorating, labor relations, anything but what she had. But the obvious had never held any interest for Molly. EFFECT left her cold. It was CAUSE she was fascinated with.
"And I've got some final checking to do," Anna equivocated. "Then I'll know everything."
"Everything? Like who is going to win the World Series? Whether God can make a stone so big He cannot lift it? What Scotsmen wear under their kilts? Or just enough to get shoved under whatever passes for a trolley there in Timbuktu?"
"Do you know what Scotsmen wear under their kilts?" Anna countered.
"I'm a psychiatrist," Molly returned. "Not a sociologist. I know what they want to wear under their kilts."
Anna laughed despite the acid drippings from the New York exchange into her West Texas ear. "I'll know everything," Anna said. "Then I'll come hang my shingle out next to yours: 'Psychiatry: 5 cents.'"
"It'll never sell on Park Avenue," Molly told her. "We're like physicians of old but instead of bleeding the patient, we bleed the bank account. Take the Root of Evil onto our own broad shoulders."
"A modern-day sin-eater," Anna said.
"You got it. Now what the bloody hell are you up to? Back to the snakes and lions, Anna."
Anna did not intend to tell Molly anything, not until she had a story with a beginning and a middle and an end. She'd called because she needed to hear her sister's voice once more. "Some checking. I'll call you Saturday and tell you what I found."
"It's Tuesday. Four days of checking?"
"No. Thursday and maybe Friday of checking."
"You're going to creep about like the Lone Ranger stalking the forces of evil clad in Virtue and Right, is that the deal? A miniature, middle-aged John Wayne."
"They're dead," Anna snapped. "Pathetic as it is, I'm it. Nobody else gives a damn. Bureaucrats-monkeys who hear no evil and see no evil-are first in line for promotion."
A long silence paralyzed the phone lines. Not even the sighing of cigarette smoke broke the darkness.
"You there?" Anna asked hesitantly.
"I'm here," Molly said. Then, very deliberately: "If you get yourself killed, I will kill you. Is that clear? I will donate all of your things to the Pentecostal Church. I will have you embalmed and put on display in the Smithsonian as the World's Biggest Horse's Ass. Call me Saturday."
"I will," Anna promised.
"Before noon. At noon, Eastern time, I call out the National Guard."
"Molly, I-"
"Gotta go. I'm reviewing Suicide as a Solution for the Washington Post."
The click. The dead line.
What the hell, Anna thought. She knows I love her.
Thursday night the moon rose full and round at 9:12 p.m. Anna was waiting for it. The light came first, a faint silvery glow on the bottom of the few ragged clouds left from the afternoon's fruitless thunderheads. Then a dome, slightly flattened, pushing up into the saddle between El Capitan and Guadalupe Peak. Fainthearted stars faded from sight. Cool, colorless light poured down the park's western escarpment, rolled out like liquid silver across the ravine-torn desert to pool black under the spreading brambles of the mesquite and shine in the cholla needles.
Sand sparkled as if lit from beneath, the white salt flats glowed with reflected glory. Shadows became fathomless. The moon, as if held to a regal creep by a suddenly broken string, popped clear of the Guadalupe Mountains. Its light bathed the Patterson Hills. Desert hills: rugged and stony and cut deep with washes. No roads, no trails intruded on this outlying stretch of land. No people hiked or camped there. Not in July when daytime temperatures rose above a hundred and ten degrees and there was no water for miles in any direction.
It was there Anna waited for the moon. The tent she would use for its meager shade if she had to sleep away the next day's heat was stuffed into its nylon sack. The gray ensolite sleeping pad she'd folded in half to use as a seat cushion. Cross-legged, hands loosely clasped in her lap, she sat in the pose of a classic desert pilgrim.
A boulder, flaked into miniscule staircases by heat and cold, threw its inky cloak of shadow over her. Sand was strewn over her tent and pack. To creatures dependent on sight and sound for their prey, she was invisible. She sipped at one of the jugs of water she had carried in. In the Pattersons, in July, she would sweat all night, losing water to the desert even in darkness. Since six p.m., when she'd begun the hike in, she had consumed almost a gallon. Two more gallons were cached close by.
Once above the escarpment the moon dwindled rapidly in size but its light flowed unabated through the dry clean air, caught the iridescent shells in the ancient reef-become-mountains and the salt crystals of the long dead sea. Anna could see each spine on the small barrel cactus growing at the edge of the shadow that hid her. Each petal of its glorious bloom was perfectly illuminated but robbed of all color. The papery flower showed blood-black.
Soon, night hunters would be coming out: the scorpion, the rattlesnake, the tarantula.
And me, Anna thought. Despite her feeling at one with the night, she was aware of a certain creepiness, a feeling of hairy-legged beasties tickling up her arms and legs.
The moon shrank to the size of a dime, passed overhead, slipped down after the stars. Shadows moved in their prescribed arcs. Anna's joints stiffened, her ears ached from listening for the alien footsteps that had heralded Craig's death the night of the last full moon. Sleep swirled around her, catching her head dropping, her dreams encroaching.
Anna rubbed her face hard, twisted her spine, hearing the settled bones cracking back into line. She took a sip of the lukewarm water. What she wanted was wine: a drink for her brain, not her body. It crossed her mind to take the pledge, go on the wagon, but she couldn't decide which was worse: pending alcoholism, or remorseless unrelenting sobriety of the rest of her days.
Taking another pull of the water, she let the sky draw her eyes into its perfect depths. No fear, nothing so petty as murder: it soothed her, overwhelmed her as it always did with a comforting sense of her own littleness; the reassuring knowledge that she was but a single note in the desert's song, a minute singing in the concert of the earth. She thought of Molly, of her office full of clients.
In the city the lights blinded the night sky, robbed it of stars. Only the moon could compete, a pale contender against the roving search lights of mall openings, the unwinking concern of security lights. No one was given an opportunity to feel deliciously small, magnificently unimportant. Everyone was forced, always, to take their dying littles as truth.
Slowly, Anna breathed in through her nostrils, inhaling the desert, knowing this wisdom would pass, knowing she would flounder in nets of her own devising a thousand times before her dust blew across the mountain ridges. But as long as the desert remained, as long as the night sky's darkness was preserved, she could read again her salvation there.