The Rope: An Anna Pigeon Novel (31 page)

Anna was growing more annoyed but no less confused.

“A carpet sweeper?” she asked. Then it came to her. In her desire to wound, Bethy thought she’d pulled out all the stops. “Carpet
muncher,
” Anna said. Bethy’s mouth formed a little
o
. Giggles bubbled through Anna’s lips, then full-blown laughter, the kind that brings tears and skips along the slippery slopes of hysteria. Hilarity was not soothing to her caller, and the more upset Bethy grew, the more Anna’s control slipped away.

When Bethy’s face began to look like a tomato about to burst, Anna laughed so hard her stomach hurt. Sitting up straight was more than she could manage. Literally doubled over with laughter, she fell off of the bed. This was funnier still. Fear that she could not stop laughing, not ever, that she would die laughing, finally sobered her. Gasping and hiccuping, she pulled herself up and leaned her back against Jenny’s bed.

Bethy was gone.

“What in the hell was that about?” Anna whispered. The habit of talking to herself aloud had been born of isolation and fear while in the jar. In the real world it was a habit she was going to have to break. People would think she was insane. Worse, people might hear what she was thinking when she preferred to keep her thoughts to herself.

*   *   *

Having showered and
washed her hair, Anna returned to her own room. This was where she would sleep tonight. Without hypothermia demanding body heat, she would sleep alone as she had every night since Zach died.

Wrapped in a towel, on the edge of the bed, she sat and stared at the open bottom drawer of her dresser. She missed Buddy. Zach was gone. Molly was two thousand miles away. Anna guessed she was like a lot of people in the world, just one baby skunk away from lonely.

For a cowardly moment she wondered if Jenny would let her sleep with her a few more nights. It was reassuring to hear another person breathing when one woke up in the creepy hours between midnight and 4:00
A.M.

Would Bethy’s accusations hurt Jenny? Were there still people in the world whose best friend
wasn’t
gay? Not in the theater. Homophobia might live on in the hinterlands. Anna infinitely preferred to be thought gay than to be known a coward. Compromising Jenny Gorman to save herself a few bad nights would be the act of a craven.

Given Bethy’s preposterous rage—and Anna’s less than soothing reaction—she was undoubtedly broadcasting to anyone who would listen that her neighbors were carpet sweepers.

Carpet sweepers.
Giggles started to rise in a frothy tide. Anna quashed them. The line between mentally stable and not had been worn too thin to take chances. Of course, with Bethy “outing” them, there was no point in worrying whether hiding out in Jenny’s room a few more nights would damage their reputations.

She examined the wounds on her thigh. The cuts had been deep, and those first days she’d had no way of cleaning them. It was pure luck—or the sterility of the desert air—that they hadn’t gotten infected.

The night she staggered back to Dangling Rope in Kay’s cutoffs, Jenny had cleaned the cuts and used butterfly bandages to pull the edges closed. They looked to be healing okay. The scabs were mostly off, and, though the wounds were still dark red, there was no proud flesh. She’d been using Jenny’s vitamin E oil. Maybe it was helping, maybe not. There was no way to tell, lacking anything with which to compare the progress. WHORE was still clear and angry. One day it would fade to thin white lines. If Anna were fortunate, there might even come a time it could be seen only with her mind and not her eyes. Until then—or until she grew a skin as thick as that of an armadillo—she would eschew bikinis.

Dressing herself in her green uniform shorts—summer weight and feeling like there was not a single natural fiber in their makeup—and the gray NPS shirt, Anna replayed her wake-up call.

Bethy thought she was after her husband. Twice Regis had rescued Anna; was that what set Bethy off? After Regis saved her from the jar, Anna occasionally felt he was either looking after her or watching her, depending on her mood. It wouldn’t be unusual if he was concerned for her well-being. Saving someone’s life could up one’s interest in that individual. The Chinese went so far as to say it made one responsible for the life saved.

Regis was Johnny-on-the-spot at her interviews with law enforcement. Boredom? Wanting to get out of the office? Gathering information he could barter for stardom at the next cocktail party? Or whatever passed for a cocktail party in Rangerland. A potluck, probably.

Bethy must have seen this as romantic interest. Anna was older than she was, older than Regis by a few years, but Anna was thin and Bethy was not. Sometimes that was enough.

Anna threaded the cordovan-colored belt through the belt loops of her shorts and buckled the brass buckle. There was such a thing as too thin, and she was it. Two Dangling Dogs with chips for lunch, she told herself.

Grabbing her ball cap, the traditional NPS Stetson being impractical on a boat, she shoved thoughts of Bethy’s morning speech from her mind. A life observing great drama, both on- and offstage, had taught her that there was no way out of an imagined love triangle. If it was a comedy, all was revealed in act three; if a tragedy, everybody died in act four. Trying to talk to Bethy or Regis would only prolong the action.

Anna had consumed a minimum of six hundred calories in hot dogs and chips, and was nearly to the bottom of her sixteen-ounce Pepsi, when Jenny finally made it back to the marina to collect her.

She rejoiced at the sight of the woman and the boat. Though a night’s rest hadn’t cleared out the fatigue of a long day’s work followed by treading water in the cold, Anna was anxious to be put to work, the harder the better.

THIRTY-SEVEN

For the next three days Anna worked and ate and slept. Along with Jenny, she cleaned two beaches. A grand haul of sixty-two pounds of human waste gathered and sealed into five-gallon cans. Under Jenny’s tutelage, she learned to pilot the twenty-eight-foot Almar cuddy and to anchor in the water and to land. The second day Jim rode with them. Anna was impressed with how he dealt with those who, in Jenny’s vernacular, “failed to see the light.”

Inexperienced as he was, Jim was a natural when it came to handling difficult people. Though her interactions with him as an EMT had been pleasant enough, given his youth and macho good looks, Anna had expected a hard-line swagger.

Apparently for Jim, law enforcement was as much about education as enforcement. Park rangers—if Jim Levitt was any indication—were a lot more lenient when it came to “ignorance of the law is no excuse.” If the ignorance was sincere, often it earned the miscreant a second chance.

On occasion, Anna helped by sensing who was sincere and who was not. Anyone who sat through thousands of auditions got to where she could spot a bad actor before he opened his mouth. Anna could often tell if they lacked sincerity within seconds of the lie’s commencement.

There was an old theater joke, attributed to everyone from Jean Giraudoux to Groucho Marx, that said sincerity was the single most important thing for an actor, because once you can fake that you’ve got it made.

Both nights she and Jenny camped on beaches. Their first camp was on a willow-fringed white sand beach in Warm Creek Bay. A piece of land, round as a coin and smaller than a Lower East Side block—less than an acre, according to Jenny—snuggled into a crescent of high sandstone cliffs that were slightly undercut, forming a natural shelter. A cave, not natural, but made by native peoples long before Columbus talked Isabella out of her jewels, burrowed twenty feet into the stone at the northernmost point of the arc.

A favorite place of the Anasazi, the beach was rich with potsherds, scraps of dusty history that fascinated Anna. Warm Creek Bay’s beach, also favored by modern humans, had subsequently been turned into an open-air latrine. Willows screened a wealth of toilet paper blooms. The small cave was as full as a week-old cat box, and the walls sported as much graffiti as a subway car on the 7 train to Queens.

While Jenny and Anna separated the ancient garbage from the modern, leaving the former and canning the latter, Jenny fumed and sparked. Anna was more baffled than anything. Poop, she could understand. Options were limited and people unprepared. What she couldn’t understand was the graffiti vandals had painted and scraped into the stone. In the city it made a twisted kind of sense. People who had nothing in their lives wanting to be seen, to leave a mark.
Kilroy was here.
Teenagers, who’d never known beauty, unaware they were destroying it, or enraged because they didn’t understand it. Kids who were never heard expressing themselves the only way they knew how. Gangbangers marking territory by spraying like tomcats leaving their sign.

In a playground for the wealthy, people destroying the beauty they’d come to enjoy mystified her. During orientation they’d stressed the parks-and-recreation ethic of preserving the natural and historical area to be enjoyed by future generations. On man-made surfaces graffiti could be painted over. Not so in a park. Paint had to be removed from rock. Scraping it off left scars that would not heal for many hundreds of years.

Anna argued for leaving the ancient cave in all its squalor and degradation. She tried to talk Jenny into posting a sign in front of it reading:
IF THIS IS THE PARK YOU WANT, KEEP ON DOING WHAT YOU ARE DOING.

Not the NPS way, Jenny told her.

They cleaned and hauled.

By day’s end, Anna was tired and sore, her hands beginning to blister and her back and legs aching. It was pain she welcomed. The approval and concern in Jenny’s eyes dulled the worst of it, and, not now, not this week, or maybe even this month, but soon, it would make her stronger. Already she could work harder and longer than when she’d first arrived at Lake Powell.

Dinners were sacred events for her and her housemate. Hunger was indeed the finest spice. The Almar cuddy was well stocked with red wine and a cooler with cheese, bread, tomatoes, avocados, cold chicken, and candy bars. Anna ate more than she ever had before. The food made her stronger, she could feel it.

At the close of the third day, they returned to the Rope. The next two days were Anna’s lieu days.

Though Jenny insisted she didn’t have to, work, food, and nights in the open gave Anna courage, and she moved back into her own room. “Don’t want to compromise your sterling reputation,” she kidded Jenny.

Unsmilingly, Jenny replied, “What about your reputation?”

Having nothing to say to that, Anna went to bed. Guilt nudged her as she slid between the borrowed flannel sheets. In a few days she’d launder and return them, she decided. It would be foolish to go cold turkey on the whole comfort thing.

Without Buddy in his drawer and Jenny at her back, she slept restlessly. Dreams of being chased by unseen malice haunted her. The stuff of nightmares—inability to move her legs and arms, inability to see clearly or cry out—had come true in the jar and the slot canyon. Dreams that came true were not necessarily a thing to be wished for.

Unrefreshed, she woke dreading a day with nothing to do to keep body and mind occupied. Buddy was gone. Jenny was working. Anna didn’t have a boat or Jet Ski and was not the least bit tempted to hike the trail out of Dangling Rope again. Effectively marooned, she could read or write letters, but that required thinking, and thinking was an activity she no longer trusted herself to do without supervision. She wanted to
do.
She needed to armor herself with muscle and purpose.

Over coffee she decided she would get in shape for the big fight or joust or whatever was coming.
Rocky, Karate Kid,
and half a dozen other movies that showed the hero doing the pre-hero warm-ups in a montage of scenes made her laugh at herself. Jogging had come into fashion her first year in college. Anna had never seen any point in running unless late for a train or being pursued by slavering Doberman pinschers. Still, she put on her shorts and Reeboks and went running.

The only trail in the limited navigable land around the Rope went down a long sloping gravel road that ended at the shore of a small finger of the lake. Heavy machinery and supplies required by maintenance were off-loaded there so they could be more easily transported to the maintenance building behind the housing area.

Thirty yards before the boat ramp, a sketchy trail veered to the left, leading up through dirt, rock, and scrub to the top of a knoll. From there it descended to an upthrust thumb of earth and rock over a hundred feet high. The only access to the thumb was a narrow land bridge. When that eroded away, the thumb would be an island. The trail wound around its base. Jim Levitt, who ran most evenings, said the circuit from housing around the rock and back was close to a mile.

Before Anna reached the point where the trail left the road, she was panting. By the time she’d run the little distance to the land bridge, she had a stitch in her side. Forced to walk a ways, eyes on her feet so she wouldn’t stumble, she began to notice that what she had spurned as sterile desert was nothing of the sort. Just as the brochure had promised, Glen Canyon boasted a rich and varied plant life. Unlike the east, where plants were grand and green and rushed into spring and summer with a blaze of color, the plants of Glen Canyon were spread out, careful to claim sufficient space so they could collect water enough to survive. Fierce and independent, they protected themselves with spines or tiny fine hairs that prickled out from the fleshier leaves. In place of the infinite palette of greens Anna’d seen in the eastern forests, here the palette was in subtle hues of sage and gray. Leaves that looked more blue than green and leaves that turned silver in the sunlight.

It surprised her to see flowers. Deep in the arid heat of summer, their defiant blues and hot pinks struck her as courageous. They did not clump together in gay profusion. She had to look for their small insistent glory and was inordinately pleased when she found it. Next time she ran, she promised herself, she would bring the brochure so she could introduce herself properly, name for name.