Pesky and two of the pack mules were milling around the small paddock, fussing at each other and snatching mouthfuls of hay from between the pipe bars on the manger.
Affecting nonchalance, Anna walked toward the gate. The mules, Jack and Jill, caught on immediately and, amid rolling eyes and halfhearted kicks, ran out into the pasture beyond. Pesky was so torn between freedom and food, he stood too long dithering.
"Gotcha!" Anna gloated as she swung the gate shut. It was amazing how soothing it was to exert power over one's fellow creatures.
She haltered Pesky and tied him to the hitching rail. Karl had moved back and was painstakingly combing the tangles from Gideon's tail.
"You look like you heard already," he said as Anna wrestled with the cinch, trying to get it tight enough the saddle wouldn't slip. Pesky was blowing up so he could loosen the strap with one mighty exhalation as soon as she got on. Pesky was the horse's earned name. His given name was Pasquale.
"Probably not," Anna grunted. "I never hear anything."
"About the hunt." The Norwegian's voice was bland, the careful neutrality of a cautious man.
Anna stopped what she was doing. The anger of minutes before was back, rising in her throat like indigestion. "Don't tell me," she said, but it was a question all the same.
"They're putting together a hunt. Paul and the Chief Ranger. Superintendent's orders."
"How can they know which one to kill?" Anna asked, knowing the answer, knowing the question was intentionally naive.
Karl just looked at her, then back to Gideon's tail.
Already rumors of a man-eater would be buzzing around the local ranches. Old stories would be flowing as fast as the Coors. Any excuse to drag out the hunting rifles was a good excuse in Texas. Texans were the best hunters in the world. They were born to it, believed in it, almost like a religion. Hunting and football, not opposable thumbs and the ability to laugh, were what separated Man from the apes.
The killing of one cat wouldn't affect the health of the lion population as a whole. Maybe if the National Park Service sacrificed one animal, preferably shot near the area of the incident, it would buy off wholesale slaughter. That's how the argument would go. It would all sound so rational when Paul or Corinne Mathers, the Chief Ranger, explained it at the next squad meeting.
"But it's just a goddamned lynching party," Anna said aloud.
Pesky twitched as if her angry words were flies landing on his neck. Karl said nothing, just combed.
Outraged injustice.
Anna was choking on it. Nobody else would care. Not enough. If a human life were on the line… But no one would see the connection, no one would see that this wasn't any different.
No one would see.
Anna leaned her forehead against Pesky's broad warm shoulder and tried desperately to feel normal.
5
THREE-six-one; seven-two-five Alpha."
The radio woke Anna at 9:13. She'd not slept that late in months. Her head felt thick and heavy with the wine she'd drunk the night before.
Lying on the hood of her old American Motors Rambler, she'd watched the stars deepen the endless Texas sky. She'd finished a bottle of California Chardonnay drinking to all lions living, all lions dead, and the lion soon to die.
Near midnight, while she'd still toasted those long-since vanished radio-collared lions, Rogelio had left, bound for Mexico, for a meeting of the Friends of the Pinacate. They were all converging at a little place he kept down there. Anna guessed he owned it. Rogelio had money from somewhere but he shied away from any specifics. She'd never been curious enough to pry.
"Three-six-one; seven-two-five Alpha," the radio bleated again and Anna swung her legs over the side of the Murphy bed to stare across the room bleary-eyed. Piedmont jumped up onto the bed and pressed his head into her ribs. Absently, she scratched the golden ears. "Three-six-one; seven-two-five Alpha."
"Answer your goddamn radio, Harland," she growled.
As if in obedience, Harland Roberts, Roads and Trails foreman, keyed his mike. "This is Harland. Go ahead."
Manny Mankins's voice, loud and clear from the Visitors Center base station, relayed the message that a visitor had seen a fawn caught in the fence a mile inside the park's boundary toward Carlsbad. It appeared to be badly injured. He asked Harland to investigate.
"Dispatch," Anna corrected. It was a part of Roberts's job to destroy problem animals. "Good morning to you, too, Manny." She rubbed her face hard. The skin felt loose and dry. "Remind me not to look in the mirror, Piedmont," she said to the cat. "Not till after I've had a shower at least." She scooped the cat up and dumped him and some Friskies near his bowl in the kitchen.
Tuesdays and Wednesdays were her lieu days, her days off. She'd call her sister, do her laundry, go into Carlsbad, shoot fifty rounds at the range, have a Prissy's Special and a couple of Tecates at Lucy's, take in a movie, do her grocery shopping. Then there'd be Wednesday to get through.
Anna flung the Murphy bed, unmade, up into its niche. While the water heated for coffee, she sat down at her desk. Her naked thighs stuck to the wooden chair. Already the day was heating up.
Opening the bottom drawer, Anna pulled out an eight-and-a-half-by-eleven envelope from under an untidy pile of bills- paid and unpaid.
"Don't do it," she said aloud. "Just don't do it." But she folded back the flap and pulled the pictures out anyway.
A tall, skinny man with fine eyes and clear pale skin looked out at her from a bridge over a little lake in Central Park. Behind him was the top of the Plaza Hotel. Terribly earnest, he stood with his hands folded on the bridge's ornate metal railing, his sensual mouth composed in solemn lines. Except for the glittering purple insect feelers hobbing on his head, he might have been a stockbroker or a young senator.
But Zach was an actor. A classical actor. He was good. He might have made it. Then again, Anna thought wearily, maybe not. During their years in New York they'd watched an awful lot of good actors give up, go home and join the family business. Or worse, stick it out waiting tables and driving cabs, keeping their courage up with alcohol and boasts.
Anna looked at the next photo. Zach's head shot. So intense. A beautiful man in that sensitive, dying-of-tuberculosis, turn-of-the-century mold. Born too tall to play Hamlet.
"God, I miss you, Zach. It's beautiful here. But you'd've hated West Texas." Anna might have laughed but her throat was too tight. It was going to be one of those days. She put the pictures away and closed the drawer gently, as if they slept.
The water for her coffee had all but boiled away. Refilling the pan, she started the morning over.
On her way into Carlsbad, Anna saw the blue six-pac pickup the Roads and Trails foreman drove parked along the fence just inside the park boundary. He and Manny were standing near the fenceline with binoculars. There wasn't a dead fawn in the bed of the truck, so she pulled over.
"Hey, Manny, Harland," she greeted them as she climbed out of the Rambler.
Manny just nodded and kept looking out across the mesquite toward the escarpment.
Harland let his glasses fall down around his neck on their strap. They weren't government issue. They were finely crafted, expensive, birding binoculars. Many things about Harland Roberts were a little classier than the run-of-the-mill. In his early fifties, he had Stewart Granger gray streaks at his temples and aquiline good looks.
Anna'd worked for him on a couple of projects. Harland got things done. In government service that was saying something.
"I didn't recognize you with your hair down," Harland said as he leaned against her car and folded his arms.
Anna pushed the cloud of hair back from her face. Thinking of Zach, feeling sorry for herself, she'd blown it dry and curled it, wearing it as she had when she was younger.
"It looks good," Harland said.
The compliment both pleased and made her feel self-conscious. "What's happening?" She jerked her chin to where Manny still surveyed the countryside.