Deep South Read Free

be offensive, she thanked them by volunteering information about herself, an intellectual breaking of bread to indicate trust and a willingness to share as they had shared their time and strength with her.
    I got a job on the Natchez Trace," she told them after giving her name.
    "I'm working for the Park Service there in Port Gibson." She was careful not to mention she was in law enforcement. Either it made people feel as if they had to take a stand on the gender issue or it inspired them to relate every story they'd ever heard where a cop had done somebody dirt.
    Still, Baby and Daddy looked blank. "The Trace there by Port Gibson?" Daddy said at last. The old man leaned on the front of the pickup, the single working headlight shining past his scrawny red-cotton-covered chest in a rural depiction of the sacred heart painting that hung in the ball of Mercy High, where Anna had attended boarding school. "Then what're you doing in these parts beside getting yourself stuck?" It was Anna's turn to look blank. "Going to the Natchez Trace?" she asked hopefully "Nope," Daddy said. "You're going nowhere," Baby added helpfully.
    "That's pretty much it," Daddy confirmed. "One of the rangers I talked to on the phone said this was a shortcut." Daddy and Baby found that inordinately amusing. Gratitude was fading, but Anna hadn't the energy to replace it with anything but pathos so she maintained her good cbeer.
    At least outwardly. "What you want is Highway 27 out of Vicksburg," Baby told her, and aimed a stream of tobacco juice politely the other way.
    "Where you're at starts out as Old Black Road and ends up as nothing down on the river. It's where me and Daddy goes fishing. All's down there is moccasins and mosquitoes."
    "I must have read the directions wrong," Anna said. "Way wrong. Those old boys was having a joke and you were it," Daddy said succinctly. "You go on a couple miles'n you'll see a place to turn around. Then you go back the way you come twenty miles or so.
    You'll find 27. If you hit the interstate, you gone too far." Anna thanked them again. They waited. She waited. Then she realized they weren't leaving till they saw her safe in her car and on her way. Having loaded Taco, she climbed in the Rambler and pulled back into the twisted night.
    Daddy was right. She'd not misread the directions; she'd followed them to the letter. One of her rangers wasn't anxious to see her arrive: Randy Thigpen, a GS-9 field ranger she'd be supervising. Anna wished she could dredge up some surprise at the petty betrayal, but she was too old and too cynical. Nobody involved in the hiring process had come right out and said anything, and in these days of rampant litigation and gender skirmishes, they wouldn't dare. But she'd heard the subtext in the pauses. There'd never been a female law enforcement ranger on the far southern end of the Trace, and there'd never been a female district ranger in any of the nine districts and four hundred fifty-odd miles of the parkway. It had been unofficially deemed too conservative, too old-fashioned for such an alarming development.
    From the gossip she'd picked up, she was hired because she was known to have an "edge." She to was an experiment, They would find if she was to be a cat among the pigeons or the other way around. The "old-fashioned" people, Anna had thought, would be the park visitors. Randy Thigpen evidently wanted to carry the experiment into the office. jump off that bridge when you come to it, she told herself.
    W hen she finally found her way onto the Trace, the sun was rising and, with it, her spirits. The vague picture she'd formed in her mind of a bleak and dusty place, over farmed by sharecroppers, dotted with shacks and broken-down vehicles, was shattered in a rainbow brilliance of flowers. "Wake up, Taco," she said, nudging the beast with her knee.
    "Hang your head out the window or something useful. The place looks like it's been decorated for a wedding." The Natchez Trace Parkway, a