The Rope: An Anna Pigeon Novel (12 page)

Sweat ran down his spine. Glen Canyon in July was so hot even Superman would sweat through his tights. Regis smiled at the thought and broke into a run for the last fifteen yards. Heart attack, heatstroke: risk.

Jenny would scream like a banshee when she found out he’d gotten her a new roommate and he was a person of the male persuasion. Jenny insisted her preference for women was not sexism but sanitation, citing the fact that women seldom, if ever, pissed on the floor and that, given her job, she should at least be allowed to eat in an environment free of human waste.

Barry Mack—aptly named “Mackerel” by his co-workers in honor of his body odor—the toilet scrubber, would be out to the Rope as soon as the paperwork to up-jump him from a GS-3 maintenance man to a GS-5 interpretive ranger was finished. Risk. Regis would definitely be on hand when Jenny was introduced to Barry and his grime-encrusted fingernails.

Panting, he let himself in through Jenny’s battered screen door. He paused and looked back into a glare the honey locusts were too small to filter out. No one was watching him. Again he laughed. Risk bred paranoia. Who cared if anybody saw him entering Jenny’s duplex? He was here on business, here to check the room the Mackerel was assigned. The room Anna Pigeon had occupied.

Bed stripped, closet doors partly open, window blind at a drunken angle in one window, air-conditioning unit in the other: The room was as he’d last seen it. Footsteps noiseless on the drab carpet, he crossed the room and turned on the swamp cooler. The fan thumped and clanked as if it were cutting carrots instead of air but, after a minute, blew cold.

He switched it off and stepped back into the hallway. The door to Jenny’s room was closed, leaving the hall in semidarkness. What light there was leaked from the bathroom at the end of the hall. Feeling for the ghosts, Regis stood in silence and stillness. The Not There were not there for him in his present heightened state. He didn’t miss their nonexistent emanations. No self-respecting ghost should be forced to haunt the likes of Barry the Mackerel.

Regis was turning to leave when the dim light from the bath caught his attention. On the bath mat in front of the sink cabinet somebody—Jenny, who else?—had arranged two lines of irregularly shaped objects. Backlit, they looked like men in a futuristic game of chess. Jenny Gorman was an interesting woman. Her sexual preferences never made her any more or less interesting to Regis. Playing peculiar games on the bathroom floor was another matter entirely.

Moving quietly out of habit, Regis closed the distance between Barry Mack’s new room and whatever Jenny had set to guard her bathroom sink. At the door, he flipped the light switch. Along the ratty edge of a faded pink terry-cloth mat, Jenny had lined up two rows of feminine detritus, tampons, birth control pills, the usual stuff women keep in the bathroom. “Riddle me a riddle: Why did the lesbian line up her girl things?” he asked the ether as he squatted on his heels.

“To convince herself she is a girl.”

That wouldn’t fly. Jenny was all girl all the time, so much so she’d fallen in love with her own gender.

Hairbrush, Xanax … Jenny didn’t strike Regis as the Xanax type. She loved the classics: nicotine and alcohol. Anna Pigeon, tranquilizers fit her.

“Damn it,” Regis hissed and snatched open the door of the cupboard. Like items lined the top shelf. The shelf near floor level was bare. When Anna Pigeon’s things were packed, these were forgotten.

Regis stood and switched the light off. People left things behind in the units all the time. Every fall, after the seasonal nomads moved on, maintenance collected the forgotten or abandoned bits and bites of them and tossed them in the trash.

These must have felt different than the usual leftovers to Jenny. Why else would she line them up as neat as soldiers on parade? Evidently, to her, these meaningless items had meaning. “When the Pigeon flies the coop, why does Jenny arrange her toiletries in two lines?” Regis muttered.

Playtex tampons, Secret deodorant—regular scent—Xanax, birth control pills in a flat round dispenser.

What they had in common was that these weren’t things women could take or leave, these were things women needed. It was unlikely they would be forgotten or purposely left behind.

If they were not purposely left behind, it suggested Anna Pigeon did not leave on purpose either. She’d been planning to come back, shower, put on deodorant, maybe change a tampon, take a birth control pill and a Xanax and go to bed.

Fear welled up, curdling the exhilaration of risk. The downside of being fully alive was that even that which was bad was felt more keenly. Fear clenched Regis’s stomach. Sweat broke out at his hairline.

What had Jenny Gorman done?

More to the point, what was she doing now?

He walked down the hall and let himself out into the sunlight. In three steps he crossed the barren ground between her porch and his own. Ignoring the heat and the glare, he collapsed into one of Bethy’s pink-and-green Walmart lawn chairs. What, exactly, had he seen? Did Jenny leave Anna’s things out knowing he would see them, knowing Anna’s position needed to be filled and Regis would come check the room? That seemed a bit far-fetched. Yet there they were, basically on display.

Television—the movies—suggested some criminals, especially the serial murderers, wanted to get caught. The Zodiac and his letters. BTK and his hints. Until this moment on the porch, searing light making his shadow hard and black as it struggled to crawl from beneath his chair, Regis had thought that was absurd.

Anna Pigeon’s belongings had been cleared out of her room. Everything except the things in that one cupboard. Regis wanted it to be simple oversight, but nothing was that simple, just like nothing was perfect. Maybe that was the catch with the perfect crime; it was impossible because the criminal would betray himself if nobody else did.

Feeble rattling trickled up from beneath the porch boards, faint as the ticking of a buried clock. Distracted from questions to which he had no answers, Regis rose from the chair and stomped once on the porch floor. Rattling came back stronger. He jumped off the porch and, in one fluid move, knelt on the dry earth. Palms on burning soil, he peered into the shadows beneath the duplex.

Pinky Winky, the midget faded rattlesnake, was pulled out to its full length. A nail behind its head and one at the base of the rattles pinned it to the ground where it was rattling out the last painful hours of its life.

FIFTEEN

As was beginning to be the norm, Anna woke with a drug hangover, a spotty memory, sand in every orifice, and thirst and pain her old familiars. Curled in a tight ball, spine against the reassuring curve of sandstone, she lay with her cheek pillowed on the sand. Night terrors, real or imagined, had settled to the bottom of the solution hole and weighed on her bare skin like chills following fever. Thirst was already clawing at her with scratchy panicked fingers. She knew she couldn’t deny herself water long enough for the drug to clear from her system. Thirst was too cruel an adversary. She would drink and, always, the monster would find her helpless, hazy, unconscious, or nearly so. Drugged until she could die without even noticing.

For a time she lay unmoving, eyes closed, repositioning herself in the universe she had fallen into, much as Alice had fallen into the rabbit hole: the jar, the sounds of movement from above, the terror, the black thing thrown into the last whisper of moonlight.

Doll’s head, she’d thought. Severed cat’s head, she’d thought.

Tarantula, she thought now. Her eyes snapped open. Only in zoos and horror movies had Anna seen tarantulas. That had been sufficient. Though inferior in size to grizzly bears, muggers, vampires, and other assorted predators, they made up for it in sheer horridness.

Tarantulas were native to Glen Canyon. That, along with the fact that there were five separate species of rattlesnakes, had been divulged during orientation by the park naturalist with what Anna thought was an inappropriate amount of glee. He had gone on to say that certain kinds of the humongous bugs made wonderful pets. He assured the assembly that the immense hairy ugly spiders were not aggressive or particularly poisonous.

They had no need to be. One look and their prey dropped dead of a heart attack, to be dragged away at the creature’s leisure.

The instant the thought scuttled into her mind on eight little feet, Anna was certain the fist-sized black fuzzy item tossed into her jar the previous night was a gigantic tarantula. Sitting up so suddenly her shoulder and head shrieked in protest, she quickly checked around her. In the meager colorless light of either dawn or dusk—depending on how long she’d been out this time—every ripple in the sand seemed the hunched back of a tarantula, ready to spring.

Hirsute insect legs tickled her lower back. Terror overrode the messages her sore tendons and bruised skull tried to send. Screaming, she thrashed, kicking and clawing to put as much distance between her and the spider as she could.

The thing came with her, running across her back where she could not see it. Still screaming, she twisted and bucked. It skittered up her spine to her neck, then over her shoulder onto her chest.

“God fucking damn it. God fucking damn it!” she wailed, wanting to cry but having neither the moisture nor the strength to do so.

It was the tail of her long braid that had tickled and clung and pursued her halfway across her sandpit. The waste of strength and the aftermath of fear burned down the channels of her brain to flicker out in the ashes of her mind.

Panting, tongue too dry to coax saliva from her cheeks or gums, Anna realized two things: One, she was naked again, and two, she was no longer afraid. The nakedness confused her. Had she imagined finding the body of a woman named Kay, stripping it, and reburying it? Had the monster come again while she lay drugged? The anti-Santa, the Satan, climbing down the chimney to steal from children and molest them as the sugarplums danced?

Day’s light grew stronger. Sunrise, then, not sunset. Anna saw the hasty burial near the wall across from where she sat and remembered how she had tried to hide her purloined finery under the sand so Mr. Monster wouldn’t take it. The belt was entirely exposed and one sandal only partially buried.

She remembered the cries and desperate scrabbling near the mouth of her lair. That memory should have engendered fear. She waited for it, but it didn’t come creeping through her bowels and up her spine.

Freedom from fear. It had been a long time since Anna had been free.

Those long terrible weeks in the New York apartment alone, she’d been afraid to go to sleep, afraid to wake up, afraid to answer the phone, afraid not to. Sitting in a red plastic chair holding Zach’s hand, she’d been scared to stay and terrified to leave. When Zach was truly gone, she was afraid of staying in the apartment they’d shared, afraid of leaving it and losing the last scents and relics of him. She’d been afraid of staying in New York, where every piece of concrete and steel reminded her of him, and afraid to leave the city they’d shared; afraid of forgetting and afraid of remembering.

Then here and this. WHORE on her thigh, thirst, drugs, pain.

Then now; fear gone as if it had been but smoke and a strong wind had blown it clear. It was as if she had been allotted enough fear to last a lifetime and she had squandered it all during three months in New York and three days in a sandstone jar. What remained in the cranial vault where decades of horror had been stored to be meted out as the slings and arrows of life demanded was a strange determination, grim and gray as slate. Determination to do what, Anna wasn’t sure. Survive? Die as annoyingly as possible? Bite the hand that had forgotten to feed her?

Moving sluggishly, she reclaimed her treasures, the belt over her head to serve as a sling, the watch on her wrist, the bra as a token bib around her neck. As she shook the sand from these items and painstakingly put them on, she watched for the tarantula. Not afraid, but not particularly wishing to be surprised by the enormous arachnid.

It had either scuttled into the deadly nightshade patch or burrowed into the sand. She had a vague recollection of watching a PBS special with Zach where tarantulas dragged other bugs into holes in the ground, stung them, and then laid eggs in their comatose bodies so the kiddies could have a fresh snack when they hatched.

Dressed, she sat with her back to the wall and rested. The canteen was beside her. She picked it up and shook it. Not a lot of water was left, a quart or less. Enough to knock her out ten times over and never truly slake her thirst. Unable to stand the feel of her throat closing, the sides of her esophagus adhering to one another, she uncapped it and took a mouthful.

Since Mr. Monster apparently hadn’t bothered to come down to torment her the previous night, maybe he was done with her, playing with her naked inert body and carving a rude word into her flesh the extent of his commitment to the relationship.

As she pondered the possibility that she had been left to die of unnatural causes, she saw the stem of one of the datura plants shift slightly. The tarantula. A black bead appeared a couple of inches above the ground. An eye. Or the tip of a feeler. Anna couldn’t remember if tarantulas had feelers. She worked her way up onto her knees. Her left arm free of the sling, she held the canteen in front of her with both hands like a shield. Spiders could jump. Anna had seen the smallest of them jump several inches. For a being less than a quarter of an inch wide, including legs, that was a prodigious feat. A tarantula the size of the one she’d seen hit the sand the night before could probably jump five feet or more.

“I will squash you like a bug,” she said to the black bead in the weeds and shook the canteen to show she meant it.

The plants quivered again, and a second black bead revealed itself.

Anna raised the canteen over her head.

The grasses moved, and a pointed black snout emerged between the beads. Both black eyes were fixed on her. Anna didn’t move. She’d stopped breathing.

Cautiously, a tiny skunk kit poked its nose from the sere foliage, then dared a paw, then another. It was no bigger than Anna’s hand, coal black with two white stripes originating above its eyes and streaming over the fur of its back to a plume of tail.