Nevada Barr - Track Of The Cat

"Maybe Craig's space aliens did it," Christina teased. "Like those mysterious cow slayings in Nebraska a few years ago."

Anna ignored the interruption. "The killer lion has apparently no hind feet. Sheila hiked in, high on acid, no water, no cuts or scratches. She must've been one hell of an acid freak to negotiate the climb out of Dog Canyon two thousand feet, no trail, full pack, then eight miles down the roughest country in the park into a saw grass swamp, stoned out of her mind, and not sustain a single scratch."

"Acid?" Christina said. "They say Sheila was taking acid?"

"The autopsy showed it. Why?"

"I didn't know is all." Christina sounded sad.

"She didn't do drugs?"

"I really don't know. She used to."

"We all used to." Anna's voice sharpened with interest. "Did she still?"

"Anna." Christina said the name in a maternal tone designed to dampen growing excitement in children. "I honestly don't know. She smoked a little dope sometimes. She believed drugs could expand your consciousness. She wasn't an old hippy-she had missed all that. But she 'dabbled,' if that's the word."

Anna was dampened but not quenched.

Christina cleaned the artichoke heart, split it carefully in two and pushed half to Anna's side of the plate.

"Pieces. Ill-fitting, motherfucking pieces," Anna grumbled. "Have you ever watched somebody talk-somebody with something wrong with them? A toupee coming unglued, a bit of mustard in their mustache? You don't hear a word they say. All you can see is that silly bit of something askew.

"That's all I'm seeing, Chris. That wrong bit of something. I'm too tired to let go. Like one of those bulldogs who lock their jaws, hang on even after they're dead."

Christina sipped her wine.

"Were you?" Anna asked, cursing herself as she did. "Sick, I mean?"

"No," Christina replied pleasantly. "I was up on that mountain, lurking behind an agave, hoping to push you over the precipice. I wish I'd pushed harder now."

"Sorry. I don't mean that," Anna said. "Nobody pushed me. Nobody was near me. It's just. I don't know… Maybe I'm just tired of stories with holes in them. Fill all the holes: understand the story." She took all of her half of the heart, dipped it in mayonnaise, and ate it in one bite. "Were you?"

The other woman laughed. It sounded genuine if exasperated. "No. Alison's sitter was. I couldn't find anyone else."

"Why did you say you heard my accident reported on the radio?"

Darkness had come, had filled the porch with warm anonymity. Anna heard a sigh, then a tiny galloping horse: soft fingertips drumming on the chair arm.

"It was easier," Christina said at last. "You're like a hawk sometimes, Anna. Waiting to swoop down on any suspicious little act that dares to creep out of some hole. I just didn't want to deal with it. I lied. So sue me."

Anna's shoulder was beginning to ache. Her head had been aching for half an hour. "Craig's launching another search for his Martians," she said, trying for a lighter mood. "Soon as the moon is full again."

"I wouldn't be surprised if he found something," Christina returned shortly. "Craig may be crazy but he's no fool."

Anna was not forgiven.

The silence stretched, grew less strained, mellowed into the night.

"Christina?" Anna asked of the shadow in the chair next to hers.

"Yes?"

"I don't think you killed anybody. I'm just tired, thinking out loud. Not very considerate of other people's feelings."

"Thank you, Anna."

"And if you did, I would drop it."

"Even if the ranchers kept pushing to kill the mountain lions in the park?"

"Sure," she said. It rang hollow.

Christina laughed, touched Anna's arm in the dark. "It's okay. Your lions need you. Alison and I don't. So. You'll go away for a while?" Christina harked back to their conversation before Anna had telephoned her sister.

"I guess," Anna said, feeling lost.

"I'll feed Piedmont."

"Ah-ah."

"I'll lift down the sack and Alison will feed Piedmont," Christina corrected herself.

Anna laughed but it hurt, pulled sore muscles in her chest and shoulder. "I'd appreciate it." Somewhere a cow lowed. The porch roof creaked with cooling. Soon Anna should go. She wished she could stay, sleep over like in junior high.

Grown-up suppers were nice but grown-up nights were long.

SOUTH of Ajo, Arizona, fifteen miles south of the Mexican/American border, Anna sat in the shade of a ramada built from the weathered branches of an ironwood. It was attached to the three-room adobe and wood house Rogelio called home. There was hand-pumped water in the kitchen and an outdoor shower rigged from a wooden barrel raised up on stilts. A pit toilet made of cedar stood twenty yards out back.

Rogelio, it seemed, had talents Anna'd never taken the time to notice. The rustic comforts were ingeniously crafted. The house was clean and well kept. Inside the thick cooling walls, cheap Mexican blankets, beautiful and raw and smelling of wool, brightened the bed. Rugs were scattered over the whitewashed floors. Straw matting woven in intricate patterns was rolled above the windows. Bits of bleached animal skeletons-desert sculptures Rogelio called them-intermixed with brightly painted wooden fishes and birds decorated the rough wooden tables. Coarse handwoven cottons in brilliant hues of red and orange, the kind Anna had seen glowing in a dozen street markets in border towns, hung over the doorways.

It was a home. Anna'd never pictured Rogelio with a home. Since Zachary, she'd never given any thought to making a home for herself, let alone for anyone else. Rogelio had made a home, he said, for her.

Desert rolled away in four directions. Small mountains, sharp and scattered like broken teeth, bit into the blue horizon. Everywhere the mysterious and, to Anna, miraculous life of the Sonoran Desert made itself felt.

Under an unrelenting sun, temperatures one hundred and ten to one hundred and fifteen during the heat of the day, the landscape was still: a green and gray graveyard with fantastically shaped tombstones stretching away over the desert pavement-the flat rocky, lifeless soil. But in the cool of the evening and under night skies, life crept out from beneath every stone, from the boles of trees and cacti.

In this harsh and fertile cradle Anna slept and healed, drank beer and made love, worked on her Spanish and wondered if she could live in this gentle rendition of "Margaritaville."

She'd been there ten days when Rogelio asked if she would marry him and she knew it was time to leave.

He leaned on the door of her Rambler. In the light of the setting sun he was impossibly beautiful. The wide-set hazel eyes reflecting the afternoon sun were nearly amber, his cheekbones high, hollowed by shadows.

"Can I come back?" Anna asked. "Drink your beer, make love with you in the desert?"

"I want to be more to you than that, Anna. More than just a good time." He smiled, teeth white in the dark-skinned face. "I'm not that kind of boy. You can't save me for later. I want to share my desert, my life, with a woman. With you if I can. With someone else if I can't. Two choices, Anna: take me or leave me." He laughed, a mix of self-mockery and hope.

"Can I come back?" Anna asked again. Rogelio thought so long she began to be afraid.

"You can come back," he said finally. "But I don't know for how long. Or how many times."

Through the cool of the night, she drove. The roads were nearly empty and the desert glowed with a moon two days past full. By the time the sun began to heat up the day she was out of the hottest part of the country, heading into the tangle of freeways that cut the heart out of El Paso. Her mind had churned the night away mixing Zachary and Rogelio, Harland and Murder, Christina and Lions into a great aching lump of thought that, by sunrise, had settled at the base of her skull.