The Rope: An Anna Pigeon Novel (25 page)

It was a relief when Jenny’s Almar putted into the harbor, its blunt nose plowing through the blue-green water. Whoever Anna was, and whatever she felt, she suddenly knew what she wanted to do: work. Not with her mind but with her body: to walk, chop wood, dig ditches, lift heavy objects and carry them up steep hills, clean Westminster Cathedral with a toothbrush, load all the human manure on Lake Powell’s beaches into five-gallon cans.

She rose and went to meet Jenny as she leaped to the dock and began winding the bow line around a cleat.

*   *   *

By day’s end,
Anna’s shoulder was killing her and she was so tired she could barely think. Other than the aching of her knitting flesh, this was ideal. Taking pity on her, Jenny let her sit and sip red wine poured from a red fuel jar dedicated to that purpose, while Jenny set up camp.

They were spending the night in the grotto at the end of Panther Canyon. Two adults and two children under the age of ten had pitched their tents beneath the curving wall to the lake side. Their boat, scarcely powerful enough to tow the two Jet Skis tethered to it, was beached nearby. To give them their space, Jenny had chosen to make camp at the opposite end of the crescent.

“Maybe I shouldn’t tell you this,” she said as she shook out the collapsing tent poles and began snapping them together on the elastic rope that joined them, “but we are camping five yards from where an army of party boaters relieved themselves for two days. They’d actually marked off that part of the grotto with empty beer bottles and jury-rigged a privacy screen for those few individuals who remained sober enough to appreciate such an amenity. Would you believe I hauled fifty-four
pounds
of human waste out of here? Four five-gallon cans.”

Anna pulled her feet up, her knees to her chest. “Did you get it all?”

“Ah, that is the question I ask myself as I dig and burrow in the beaches of Lake Powell.”

“Maybe the park should replace the sand with clumping litter,” Anna suggested.

Jenny laughed. “I’ll mention that to the superintendent next time he asks a GS-5 seasonal for her opinion.”

The tent was orange and dome shaped and sat lightly on the sand like half a melon on a plate. Human waste or not, Anna would leave the tent to Jenny. The space inside was too small and the color too much like sandstone at sunset for Anna to allow herself to be enclosed within. The day had been ninety-two and cloudless. The night would be warm. The tent was for privacy and to keep out the bugs and the sand.

“I’m going to go introduce myself to the neighbors and see if I can’t strike up an elucidating conversation about poop,” Jenny said as she tossed the stuff sack containing her sleeping bag into the tent.

“The little kids ought to love that,” Anna said. The wine was good. She stretched out her legs and felt the muscles begin to relax.

“Kids are great audiences for poop talks,” Jenny said. “These are a little young. Boys eight to twelve are the best. Want to come?”

“I’ll pass.” It was after six, suppertime for campers. Anna had yet to let go of the schedule she’d kept for so many years; lunch around three, supper at midnight after the curtain came down.

Though the sun still shone on much of the lake, it had long since set in the narrow tongue of Panther Canyon. Twilight would last several more hours. Anna leaned back into one of the “chairs” Jenny had brought up from the boat. They were clever things, two thin pads with a fabric hinge between that could be locked into an L shape by snapping straps that extended from the four corners. Camping had changed from the heavy canvas and cots Anna remembered from when she was very small.

She watched Jenny cross the sand to the visitors’ camp. Jenny was wide hipped with long strong legs. Muscles in her calves bunched as she stepped over the uneven ground. Her shoulders were square and her arms brown from working in the sun, biceps well defined. Jenny moved with the ease and grace of a warrior who had vanquished the invaders and returned to tend the land.

Physical strength had never been high on Anna’s priority list. Her work had demanded the ability to organize and focus. A stage manager’s greatest asset was the gift of paying attention at all times and to all things so none of the thousands of threads that must be woven together to create the director’s vision was lost, late, or broken.

Zachary, her husband, tall as he was, was not a strong man. He was willowy, slender, and supple, with long fingers that could speak as eloquently as most men’s tongues.

Smiling, Anna remembered a crew member asking Zach to pick up the other end of a massive oak refectory table that needed moving. Zach had been unable to so much as disturb the wood. Sweeping a gracious bow to the other man, he had said, “Alas, all I have to offer is my civility.”

A day spent fetching tools and carrying buckets and the case containing Jenny’s water-sampling paraphernalia had worn Anna out, while Jenny remained unfazed. The ill-fated trek up to the plateau had exhausted her to the point that her muscles were quivering and she could scarcely breathe. Unearthing Kay had been a Herculean task. Carrying a fifteen-ounce skunk up a twenty-foot ladder taxed her strength. The hours she’d been lost, looking for the trail back down to Dangling Rope, she had almost given up because she was so weak and tired.

Had she been stronger, maybe the boys would not have caught her. Maybe she could have fought them off long enough to get away.

Anna resolved to eat more and get strong. Everybody died. Cars killed, microbes, viruses, cancers, plaque, bullets, knives, gravity: Death came in one form or another in the end. Death would come for Anna, she knew that. She swore when it came it would find her strong.

Never again would she go down without a fight.

THIRTY-ONE

Jenny was in excellent form. She charmed the adults, entertained the children, and left their camp feeling she had enlisted four more people in her campaign to free Lake Powell’s beaches from the rising tide of toxic waste.

As the campers headed toward their Jet Skis for an evening ride, she turned and went back toward her own campsite. Her feet felt light, her heart soared, and she laughed out loud. She was young, living in the most amazing place on earth, doing important work for reasonable remuneration, and she was in love.

The exhilarating alignment of the heavens was sufficiently rare that she recognized her moment of joy, thus making the joy that much more potent. That her darling little pigeon was probably woefully heterosexual, and their union might never be consummated, didn’t dampen her enthusiasm by any noteworthy amount.

“Statistically insignificant,” she called to her beloved, not caring that she got nothing but mild confusion in return. Infrequently—but nonetheless deliciously—loving pure and chaste from afar was a grand thing.

Then, too, sometimes a girl got lucky.

Flopping down on the sand next to Anna, she asked, “Is there any more wine?”

Anna handed her the red fuel bottle. This wasn’t Jenny’s cheap
vin ordinaire
but a twenty-seven-dollar bottle of Chateau Ste. Michelle Merlot that had been reserved for a special occasion. Two more bottles of her usual waited on the boat as backup. Not to inebriate for the purpose of seduction—such acts were beneath an enchantress of Jenny’s stature—but to ensure a mellow evening.

At the moment Jenny felt anything but mellow. Had there been tall buildings, she would have leaped them, dragons, she would have slain them, if it would have enhanced the pleasure of her new mistress.

“You look like the cat that ate the canary,” Anna said.

Would that it were a pigeon, Jenny thought wickedly and smiled. “I feel positively grand,” she said. “We’ve hours of light left. Where can I take you? What can I show you? Your wish, my command.”

“You can show me who shoved me into the jar,” Anna said flatly.

With that jab of reality, Jenny’s elation deflated somewhat. “Ugly thoughts for such a beautiful evening,” she said gently.

“I know. Sorry,” Anna apologized. “My solution hole isn’t all that far from here, is it? Not as the frog hops?”

Anna must have been looking at maps. A week ago Jenny would have bet she neither knew nor cared about the geography of the lake and its environs.

“The end of Hole-in-the-Rock Road is maybe a quarter of a mile from the head of this canyon,” Jenny told her. In saying the words she realized not only was that true but— “Those college kids,” she said suddenly, sitting up straight. “They didn’t have to come up from the Rope or down Hole-in-the-Rock from Escalante. They could have climbed out of Panther.”

Now Ms. Pigeon was interested. She looked out over the skinny lick of water that fronted the grotto. “Sheer cliffs,” Anna said. “What? Sixty, eighty feet up to the plateau? They would have had to be bitten by a radioactive spider to pull that off.”

“Come with me,” Jenny said, delighted she had found a gift for her new friend. “Be prepared to strip to your underwear—or skin, if you prefer the classics.”

Watching how stiffly Anna got to her feet, Jenny felt a pang of remorse. The poor little thing had seemed determined to do the work of ten men regardless of the fact her shoulder hadn’t fully healed and she should have been on bed rest after the trauma she’d suffered.

“We don’t have to go,” Jenny said earnestly. “I was just going to show you the slot canyon that forms the end of Panther. It’s been there since Zeus was in knee pants. It will still be there tomorrow. You should rest. Let me fix you some dinner.”

“No,” Anna replied, evidently determined to push herself until she dropped in her tracks. “I want to see it. I like the idea they could have come up from here. It makes more sense than the road or the trail. Show me how.”

Jenny looked at her for a second, watching her gather her little strength around her great heart, and silently mocked herself for describing it as such. Despite the mockery she was so proud of Anna tears stung her eyes.

“I am so very completely and totally an idiot,” she said softly.

Anna had ducked into the tent to get her boating shoes. If she heard Jenny’s brief autobiography she gave no sign.

Beyond the grotto, the long skinny finger of lake snaking its way along the bottom of Panther Canyon narrowed precipitously. The gunwales of Jenny’s boat were scarcely a foot from the eighty-foot-high cliffs forming the sides of the slot canyon. Running at idle, she nosed the boat forward until both sides of the Almar’s bow touched the sandstone, then scraped, then the boat stuck like a cork in a bottle. Having shut down the engines, Jenny joined Anna where she knelt on the bow looking, to Jenny’s eye, like one of Arthur Rackham’s fairies.

Three feet from where the bow was wedged, giant stone steps, with an almost man-made symmetry, rose thirty feet above the lake level. Like a calving glacier, great rectangles of rock had sheared from the sides of the slot and fallen in a neat pile, completely blocking the canyon. To either side of the giant’s staircase another sixty feet of cliff cut upward before the earth gave way to the ribbon of sky. With the sun gone from them, and the sky turning pearl, the rock appeared dove gray and soft as velvet. The water ran dark, a blue that is only the blink of an eye from black.

“Pretty amazing, huh?” she asked when Anna didn’t speak.

Anna was shaking her head. The end of her long braid twitched across the back of Jenny’s hand. She stifled the urge to catch it as she might a cat’s tail.

“It’s too steep. It’s too high. Nobody could get out.” Anna’s voice, usually an alto, smooth as warm honey, had risen an octave and was all sharps and flats. Her eyes were too wide. Around the dark hazel irises Jenny could see white.

As a gift to her beloved, Jenny had effectively put the poor thing back into the jar. “Oh, honey,” she cried. “I am so sorry. I should have known. I’m such a blockhead. Come on. Let’s go back to camp, forget we ever came here.”

Anna didn’t move. She was shaking her head again.

“No,” she said, her voice still unnaturally high. “I can stay. I will stay. This is just a crack full of water. It won’t slam shut.”

Anna’s last word finished on a high note. Not quite a question, but clearly a plea for reassurance.

“The walls will not slam shut,” Jenny said firmly and waited as Anna breathed slowly in through her nose and out through her mouth. Meditation, Jenny knew from her years of shrinkage. Three breaths and Anna said, “Tell me how they could have gotten to the plateau from here.”

“Not here,” Jenny said. “Past this pile of sandstone.”

“What happens past the rocks?”

“The slot starts to get seriously narrow.”

Anna groaned. “You’re kidding?”

“Cross my heart and hope to die,” Jenny said. Then, because she couldn’t help it, she added, “It’s really beautiful.”

“In a strangled creepy kind of way?” Anna asked. She was using humor to cover her fear. Jenny admired that and laughed to reward her courage.

“Coming here wasn’t that great an idea. Let’s go back and finish off the wine. Besides, wait till you see what I brought for supper.” She laid her hand on Anna’s arm. The gesture had been meant to reassure but it had sent a jolt of pure lust right up the center of Jenny. Pure and chaste from afar
,
she reminded herself.

Staring at the immense steps rising out of the lake, Anna hadn’t noticed Jenny’s brief internal battle between good and evil.

“I don’t see how anybody could possibly climb out of here without those things climbers nail into the walls and the ropes and pulleys or whatever they use,” Anna said.

Focus had taken the glaze from Anna’s eyes and the edge from her voice. Seeing her somewhat recovered, Jenny said, “Come on. I’ll show you.” The bow of the snub-nosed boat was sufficiently wedged—and this far from the washing-machine action of the main body of the lake, it wasn’t going anywhere. Still, Jenny jumped the yard of water between the boat and the sandstone stair and secured the bow line around a big friendly rock. Little was more embarrassing for a boat ranger than to lose her boat. Fortunately Jenny was an exceptionally strong swimmer. Both times she’d let her boat escape she’d been able to reclaim it without hopping pathetically around on shore begging kindly visitors to take their boat out and retrieve it for her.