The Rope: An Anna Pigeon Novel (15 page)

Head and shoulders cleared the neck of the jar. The world expanded around her, so startling in its immensity that she had the dizzying sensation she was expanding with it, her mind exploding toward the horizon in every direction.

Then she was well and truly out, belly down on the rocky ground, gasping for breath. A tickle at her thigh let her know Buddy was not dead. Relief at finding she had not killed her friend and savior rivaled that at having escaped the monster. “Run, Buddy,” she whispered. “Run.”

A breeze moved across the rocky plateau. After so long in the absolute stillness of her underground prison, wind felt like life itself. The moon had not yet set, and the desert glowed in stark blacks touched by silver, gentle washes of luminescence over smooth bulges of stone. Even the sharp gouge of rocks beneath her body felt good after an eternity of fine sand. To be free was so exquisite Anna was drunk with it.

Spread along the ground under the length of her body, the ladder twitched to life. Instantly sobered, she rolled off of it, onto her injured arm. Pain took her as she either relocated or totally dislocated her shoulder joint. Had she not been down already she would have collapsed.

The ropes between the rungs grew taut, lifting off the stone as the treads were set up on their edges by the tension.

The monster was climbing out.

It was too late to pull the ladder up. He was already on it and climbing fast. She staggered to her feet. If she ran he’d catch her, catch her and throw her back into the hole. She grabbed up a rock the size of a softball and threw it down the neck of the bottle. There was a grunt of surprise, but she didn’t think she’d hit him. Without strength behind it, even if she did, it wouldn’t stop him.

Bigger, she needed something bigger. “No, no, no,” she sobbed, as she looked desperately around. Several feet from the hole was a roundish rock the size of a basketball. Too big; she would never find the strength to shift it.

The largest muscle in the human body is the gluteus maximus:
She remembered that from somewhere. Falling more than sitting, she planted hers on the ground. Bracing the soles of her feet against the rock, she shoved with all the power of her thighs and butt. The stone came loose with a sound like ripping paper and rolled within a foot of the entrance to the jar. Scraping skin from her bare legs and elbows, Anna crab-walked after it and again shoved with both heels. The rock rolled to the edge of the hole, teetered, then, eerily silent, rolled out of sight.

A monster roar came from the depths, followed by the crash of rock and man at the bottom of the hole. Unless he’d been knocked senseless, he would be back at the ladder before she could drag it up. The ladder was not one but two boat ladders tied together, with wire wrapping the top rung of one tightly to the bottom rung of the other. The top ladder retained the two U-shaped metal hooks used to secure it the side of a boat. The monster had anchored it by laying a rusted metal fence post behind two boulders the size of Volkswagens, slipping the hooks over the post, and pulling the metal tight against the stones.

Crawling, Anna made it to where the hooks hooked over the post and jerked them free. The instant she did, they leaped like live things and ran scraping across the earth to follow the stone into the gullet of the jar. Silence followed, broken only by the gentle rain of sand trickling through the throat of sandstone that had swallowed so much so quickly.

Shaking and gasping for breath, Anna tried to stand. Her legs would not support her. On her knees, she stared at the black slit, expecting at every breath that it would suddenly spew forth life, that great angry hands and gnashing teeth would emerge to drag her screaming back down into darkness.

The trickle of sand ceased.

Anna’s breathing evened out.

Buddy appeared from wherever he’d run to hide and watched her tentatively, ready to run if she began flailing and throwing things again.

The night grew so still, the moonlight fading, the stars achingly bright overhead, that Anna felt unreal, as if she had dreamed the whole thing, as if she were dreaming still.

Then came a voice into the world, soft and gentle.

“Anna? What have you done?”

NINETEEN

Jenny was thinking about snakes. Even as a child, she’d liked them. When other little girls were screaming and running from horrid little snake-wielding boys, Jenny had wanted to see and touch. An early lesson in life had been the gift of a snake-wielding boy—Carl Johnson. Jenny remembered him vividly; he’d been her first-grade crush. Carl had been pursuing her at the school picnic, yelling, “Snake! Snake!” Undoubtedly courtship as understood by six-year-olds. Jenny had run a few yards, then stopped to touch and see.

Carl had been chasing her with a crooked stick.

Probably why I’m gay, she thought idly as she sipped her coffee, then took a drag off the sorry-looking cigarette she’d rolled.

Jenny loved the way snakes looked, the way they felt—like the finest silver chain—as they slipped through her hands, the way they moved or lay sunning themselves. Pinky Winky, the faded midget rattler, had been beautiful in all the snaky ways. Until he wasn’t.

Flies had let her know the pink-colored rattlesnake needed burying. She’d seen them buzzing in a cloud near Regis’s porch. The nails used to stretch the snake she’d left in the dirt. The snake she had interred, coiling the limp body as if it were preparing to strike, and marking the tiny grave with a rock that was almost exactly the hue of the snake’s skin. Pinky’s skull had been crushed. Jenny wanted to believe she had been killed before she was crucified, but the tearing around the nail holes and the amount of fluid told her otherwise.

The episode upset her more than she wanted to admit. This season on the lake—one of the few places in the world where she felt at peace, sure of her place, sure of her job, safe in the knowledge that here, at least, she knew what she needed to do and was the person most capable of doing it—had somehow gone awry.

Because she had backslid and begun to obsess about her housemate, a part of her wanted to lay the totality of her dis-ease at the feet of Ms. Pigeon. A woman who, for all intents and purposes, had vanished from the face of the earth. Silently, invisibly, little Ms. Pigeon packed up her clothes and keepsakes and disappeared to a place where women didn’t need tampons, birth control pills, ChapStick, or Xanax.

Paradise, evidently.

Jenny shifted on the rough planking, folding one leg on top of the picnic table, canting herself west. The sun was nearly set. Perhaps, tonight, she could sleep free of weird dreams of the redheaded stage manager.

Tomorrow she would camp in the Panther Canyon grotto. There would be at least one other group and probably two or three. She would use the depredations of the party boaters as interpretive and educational opportunities for the newcomers.

Uncharacteristically, she was not looking forward to a night spent in the grotto, nor was she looking forward to a day on the water, visiting beaches, taking water samples, and greeting guests. That nasty snake business wouldn’t let her alone. For reasons only a few old-line shrinks would think phallic, the fate of the snake and that of Anna Pigeon were related. Jenny couldn’t say why, but it felt true.

She stubbed out her cigarette. As she field-stripped it, crumbling the last bit of tobacco and rolling the scorched end of the cigarette paper into a spit wad, she smelled the distinct odor of skunk. Wafting from a polite distance, the reek wasn’t unpleasant. This was.

The stench heralded dragging footsteps.

Jenny stepped off the porch into the space between Regis’s duplex and hers. Superstitious fear brushed her mind as she stared into the gloom beneath the cliffs. A skin walker, a Navajo creature half human, half animal, was shambling toward the duplexes.

She recovered in less time than it would have taken to speak the thought aloud. This was no coyote in human form; it was a woman, naked from the waist up, hair unbound, hanging witchlike past her hips, obscuring her face.

With her traveled the stink of skunk. Jenny did not move to meet her. As the apparition came nearer, she could see the woman’s arms were crossed on her chest as if she cradled a baby.

The last ray of sunlight touched her, and the wild hair flashed dusty red. She shook it back, exposing a gaunt face, cheekbones prominent, eyes enormous. Blood had dried around her lips where they’d cracked and bled. She cradled not a baby but a skunk kit no more than seven or eight weeks old.

“Anna?” Jenny whispered. “Is it you?”

The woman stared at her with feral eyes. “Give me a drink of water,” she croaked, “and maybe I’ll tell you.”

TWENTY

Anna gulped down a quart of water, then promptly vomited it up, as Jenny Gorman warned her she would. Anna didn’t care. It had been worth it to drink as much and as fast as she wanted, a wild luxury she hadn’t known before how to properly appreciate.

After Jenny promised to take care of Buddy, Anna showered, taking sips of water as it sprayed on her face, sticking her tongue out and wagging it so every part got its share. Dirt and blood sluiced from her body and hair. She felt the way a resurrection fern must in the first rain after a long dry spell, as if her leaves were greening and swelling, her hair becoming soft and fine, her skin supple and alive. Once clean, she poured two quart cans of tomato juice over herself and worked it into scalp and skin. Buddy had not sprayed her, but she reeked from lingering fumes.

When the last of the hot water was gone, and twenty minutes more of the cold, she put on the clothes Jenny laid out for her. Cotton was her armor, cloth a second skin to protect her from the elements, from exposure. Anna wallowed in getting dressed in actual clothes. Beyond Jenny’s bedroom door she heard forces being marshaled. Radios crackled as Jim Levitt radioed the chief ranger and whoever else had to know about laws broken in the park and rec area. Jim Levitt made his calls from the porch, kept from the apartment only by Jenny’s insistence.

Soon law enforcement personnel would be descending on the Rope. Anna looked forward to it only slightly more than she’d looked forward to the monster descending into the jar. Knowing she would eventually have to face them Anna took her time, pulling on borrowed clothes: a soft white tank top, socks—despite the heat—and one of the finest gifts she’d ever been given, a pair of clean underpants. Dressed, covered, cloaked, her skin and her sins hidden, Anna thought she could find the courage to face them.

In long khaki pants and a long-sleeved cotton shirt, both three sizes too large for her, she emerged from the sanctuary of Jenny’s room, sat at the Formica counter in the kitchen, and let Jenny serve her small bits of food.

From Anna’s first vomiting to putting on clothes to the dessert of blueberry yogurt, Jenny pestered her with questions. “Where were you? What happened? Are you hurt? Why do you have a baby skunk? What happened to your things? How did you hurt your shoulder? Didn’t you go back to New York? Why did you leave your birth control pills? Where have you been? Where have you been? What happened to you? Were you kidnapped? Did you fall into a ravine?”

Anna hadn’t answered. Using exhaustion and dehydration and general pathos to put Jenny off, she had taken care of her body and let her mind idle, the decision of how much to tell, how to tell it, and to whom drifting in the background. The jar felt like a secret, one she wanted to keep.

As she lapped the last of the yogurt out of its plastic container much the way a mannerless child or a puppy might, Jenny let Jim Levitt in. The law enforcement rangers on Lake Powell were also emergency medical technicians. Jim had taken his education further and was a paramedic. He asked Anna to move from her solitary stool and sit on the dilapidated couch. Because she couldn’t think of a logical reason to refuse, she did as she was bid.

She knew who Jim Levitt was. He lived in the other half of the Candors’ duplex. Jenny’s partner in training visitors in proper waste management protocols, he’d ridden with them a couple of times. Absorbed in miseries she’d bused in from New York, Anna hadn’t given him much thought.

Now she was finding it hard not to leap off the sofa and run from the room as he unfolded a bright orange pack full of first aid supplies on the coffee table in front of her. Hard not to hit or push when he sat next to her. Hard not to jerk away as he prodded her arm and pinched her fingertips, asking where it hurt.

Understand the monster and live.

The thought startled her. Jim Levitt was not a monster—at least not that she knew of. He was a big, pleasant-looking man, no more than twenty-two at a guess, with dark close-cropped hair, dense as a knit cap, and wide-set brown eyes, kind and intelligent, under straight black brows. His shoulders were overmuscled and his neck thick. Probably he’d played a lot of football in high school and college. Crooked but very white teeth gave his smile character, as did the bump on the bridge of his nose from an old break.

Directors in New York would cast Jim Levitt as the small-town hero who went off to war and never came back, or the big brother who took care of the family when Dad was too drunk to.

Even as Anna made note of these reassuring characteristics, her stomach was clenching and her skin trying to shrink closer to her bones. She was not free of the jar. Men, all men, but powerful men in particular, were a threat to a small female with naught but a baby skunk for protection. The monster was faceless and so could be anyone. Could be everyone. The WHORE cut into her thigh felt as if it bled whenever Jim leaned too close, burned when he touched her.

As the paramedic palpated her head, seeking any residual damage from the bang to the skull she’d gotten, Anna dug her nails into her palms to keep from screaming. The blood pressure cuff felt like an iron manacle crushing her arm, the thermometer a blade beneath her tongue.

Either Jim sensed her fear, or had seen enough of it in his work to read it on her face. The examination finished, he closed the EMS kit and, moving slowly and deliberately, the way Anna did when she didn’t want to frighten a skittish cat, stepped away and sat in the chair across from the couch. Anna liked him for that; it was easier to draw breath, easier to ignore the acid word on her thigh.